Testing a $35 Firefox OS phone—how bad could it be?

Hey! You there! You've got it pretty good, you know that? While you're sitting there using your Internet-enabled device to read about some other Internet-enabled device, it's easy to forget that the majority of people doesn't have any access to the Internet at all. The "World Wide" Web is actually not that worldwide—only about one-third of the population is online. That's 4.8 billion people out there with no way to get to the Internet.

Bridging this digital divide will be one of the tech industry's biggest challenges—and growth opportunities—over the coming years. As all-encompassing as the Internet feels now, the user base has the potential to triple in size. So as of late, we've started to see Internet companies take an interest in getting more of the disconnected world online. Facebook launched Internet.org, and Google has a ton of projects that aim to provide Internet by fiber, balloon, and drone for example.

But these initiatives are all focused on merely bringing Internet access, not addressing the actual hardware necessary to display the Internet. Enter the Intex Cloud FX, a $35 (Rs 1,999) smartphone from India aimed precisely at this issue. The Cloud FX runs Firefox OS, Mozilla's home-grown OS. Firefox OS is entirely Web-powered, and, therefore, Gecko, Firefox's layout engine, runs just about everything on the device. Apps are built entirely from Web technologies. Think "Chrome OS"—but from Mozilla and on a smartphone.

Fair warning: we're going to talk frankly and honestly about the Cloud FX, and it's not going to be pretty. As we journey into the world of sub-$50 smartphones, leave all worries about performance, user experience, and any kind of pleasantness behind you. While $35 doesn't buy you a lot, perhaps we're past the stage of "does it work well?" The question for a device like Cloud FX may simply be: "Does it work at all?"

The Internet, as cheap as possible

Today's Internet is wildly skewed in favor of rich, English-speaking companies and users. Only five percent of the world's population speaks English as a first language, but 55 percent of webpages are in English.

The countries without Internet access are exclusively the poorer ones—the "developing world." That means our Internet device is going to need to be as cheap as possible so that people can actually afford it, and the cheapest Internet-enabled device we can make is the smartphone. Its small size and relatively lightweight OSes are both qualities that lead to a low bill of materials, provided you aren't trying to make it powerful enough to double as a game console.

Besides being the cheapest computer we can make, a smartphone is the perfect device for this environment. Its self-contained nature makes it easy to take along in a pocket. The battery is great when there's no power. Long-distance wireless Internet, like cellular data technologies, is much cheaper to deploy than laying cable. For many people in developing countries, the smartphone will be their first Internet device.

Cloud FX is one of many offerings aiming to serve India, which has a combination of a really high population—1.2 billion people, second only to China—and really low Internet penetration—only 12.6 percent. China's 1.3 billion people aren't as good a target as you would think, thanks to a relatively high Internet penetration rate of 42.3 percent and a government that really, really hates the idea of a free and open Internet.

The highest-profile, India-focused device initiative thus far has been Google's Android One, which gives Indian OEMs an easy way to build high-quality smartphones that end up costing around $100. That sounds dirt cheap, but consider that the average monthly wage in India is around $295, and you'll realize that's still not good enough for most people.

Google's goal of "high-quality" with Android One is the problem. When you have no Internet at all, 60FPS animations and the latest software aren't really your primary concern. You just want to get online, within budget, any way you can; any Internet is better than no Internet. Which is where the Cloud FX factors in.

The Intex Cloud FX—2007's technology, today

Specs at a glance: Intex Cloud FX
Screen	480×320 3.5-inch (165PPI) LCD
OS	Firefox OS 1.3
CPU	Spreadtrum 1GHz SC6821
RAM	128MB
GPU	Mali 400
Storage	256MB (46MB available)
Networking	802.11g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Network	GSM 900 / 1800
Ports	MicroUSB
Camera	2MP rear camera
Size	115.9mm x 62mm x 11.8mm
Weight	104g
Battery	1250mAh
Starting price	$35 unlocked
Other perks	MicroSD slot (up to 4GB), Dual SIM slots, FM Radio,

The $35 price tag should color every sentence you read about the device. Though it is so cheap that most flaws can be forgiven, we still feel it's our duty to point them out.

We're not dealing with a speed demon here. The spec sheet looks like it's about seven years old: a 3.5-inch 480×320 LCD, a 1GHz single-core Cortex A5 CPU, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of storage, and a 2MP camera. That's roughly equivalent to a first-gen iPhone from 2007, but today you can buy 14 Cloud FXes for the launch price ($500) of the first base-model iPhone.

Missing from the spec list are several items you'd expect to find in a modern smartphone. There's no front-facing camera, no notification LED, no camera flash, no LTE, no 3G, and no GPS. The only available geolocation is from your IP address, which will (at most) narrow your location to your current city or town.

With only a few MB of free space out of the box, users need a MicroSD card for media consumption or picture-taking. While you can store pictures on the internal memory, there really isn't any space.

The other really weird thing missing is any kind of battery backup for the time. If the phone loses power, the time and date gets reset, leaving it looking like an old VCR blinking "12:00." So much of the Internet runs over a secure connection now, and the proper time needs to be set on the device or else it will think everyone's certificates are expired and may deny secure connections. When the time gets reset, you can't connect to the Firefox OS marketplace and download an app, you can't pull your e-mail over POP or IMAP, and every secure webpage will throw up an error.

Sure, the time will sync down from the cell signal—if you have a cell signal. Remember, though, this is meant for developing countries where mobile coverage may still not be complete. (It's easy enough to find "no service" in the US.) The time won't sync over Wi-Fi, either. It's perfectly possible to hit a Web server and pull the correct time—most desktop OSes do that—but Firefox OS doesn't.

Design & Build Quality

Two words about the phone's build quality: "not good." $35 means we're using the cheapest materials available. If you look closely, the plastic on the front half of the device isn't even a uniform color, giving it a grainy appearance. The color Intex is aiming for is clearly a smooth "black," but look closely and you'll see it's really a spectrum of tiny plastic bits fused together.

The phone shell has a needlessly busy looking three-layer construction. Half of the side is made up of the grainy plastic, then there's a strip of glossy plastic and a wrap-around back panel with a diamond pattern in it. We would think the low price would lead to a simple design, but there's a lot going on here.

We've called phones "cheap feeling" before, but the Cloud FX takes things to a whole 'nother level. At almost 12mm thick, the Cloud FX is about 1.5 times the thickness of a high-end smartphone. The device is light and feels almost hollow for the size, which makes sense since a good portion of the case is actually filled with air. Internally there's a gap between the battery and the semi-flexible back panel, so the back of the phone is squishy. A significant air gap also exists between the touchscreen and the LCD.

The Cloud FX therefore puts off a vibe on par with those toy flip phones that dispense candy. The whole exterior feels more like a "parts bucket" than anything that was designed to impart positive feeling to the user. The shell does at least serve its primary purpose of holding the phone together, though. It doesn't squeak or creak, and other than the squishy back panel (which granted, is about half of the phone) the device feels sturdy.

The body is large for the 3.5-inch display, which means about 40 percent of the Cloud FX front is bezel. The 480×320 display reminds us of a first-generation LCD, as the only angle that results in a decent picture is a perfect 90 degree angle. Horizontal viewing angles are OK, but move a few degrees off-center vertically, and the screen starts to invert. At about 20 degrees off perpendicular, the screen inverts completely, looking like negative film.

It's often hard to tell what color something really is, since the colors change so easily, depending on the screen angle. It wasn't until after taking screenshots for this article and viewing them on a better LCD that we had a sense of what the software looked like. The poor vertical viewing angles get even weirder in landscape mode, where the screen has a strange "shimmery" appearance, and you can never get the left side of the screen to look the same as the right side. Trying to play a game in landscape mode actually gave us a bit of a headache, since any small movement would change the colors.

We're pretty sure the front touchscreen is just a hard plastic. High-end smartphones bond the LCD to the front touchscreen, which gives a brighter picture and better viewing angles. The Cloud FX has no such luxuries, though, and the large gap between the LCD and front glass probably contributes to the poor image quality.

Besides the screen, the front of the device houses a single capacitive home button and the earpiece. The lack of a back button on Firefox OS might seem like a strange choice, but most Firefox OS "apps" aren't complex enough to need a permanent back button. The ones that do—like the settings—just throw a back button on the screen somewhere.

The back case has a diamond pattern cut into the back of it, almost exactly like the knurling you would find on a set of dumbbells or on a hand tool. It's rather industrial but also nice and grippy. The back includes a 2MP camera, a few logos, and the speaker. If you give the rear speaker some room to breathe, you'll find it's often louder than what you get on a high-end smartphone. However, it's much more distorted; Intex was clearly just aiming for max loudness here with no regard for sound quality.

The back pops off, revealing the meager 1250mAh battery. Under the battery you'll find a MicroSD slot and two SIM slots, a popular feature in India that allows a user to use two carriers simultaneously.