Mozilla Seabird concept phone - and a rant
Mozilla has an interesting Seabird concept phone rendering posted to YouTube. It looks great but disappointingly it's not real, contains technology that doesn't yet exist at the consumer scale, and is built on top of Android.
The Android part makes me sad, not because it's Android but because it's not MozillaOS (GeckoOS?). Google is basically doing now with Android what Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s -- providing manufacturers with something they can use pretty much off the shelf rather than rolling their own. So just like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al never bothered to innovate or create great new PC OS, no one who doesn't already have a mobile OS (Apple, RIM, HP via Palm, Microsoft) is going to bother making one any more. Even the so-called Facebook phone looks like it's going to be built on top of Android.
That means, like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al the innovation will turn to hardware, and differentiation will be left to software skins, bloatware, and stickers on the box. Impressive, perhaps, in the Alienware sort of way. But imagine if Mozilla was starting in the browser space now, would they just use Chromium instead of their own Gecko as the foundation for Firefox? Would Facebook have built their social network on the Twitter API?
For a while mobile OS were explosively innovative. We went from Newton to PalmOS to Windows Mobile to BlackBerry to Symbian to iPhone/iOS to Android to webOS and all sorts of experimental Linux-based OS that may or may not see the light of day. It was so much more exciting than the Windows/Mac/Linux pace of PC OS.
Sure it's hard making an OS, even with BSD Unix or Linux at its core. Sure going Android would certainly save Mozilla or Facebook or Verizon (yeah, went there), a lot of time and money, but part of me hoped we were just at some mid-point in the mobile revolution, that we'd still have the chance to be blown away by an iOS or Android or webOS again. That we wouldn't have to wait for the next big transition -- to neuralOS or whatever it will be -- before we get that feeling of everything being new again.
So great concept, great tech, spectacular vision, but that even in a video rendering this wasn't running an amazing MozillaOS as thought-provoking in software as the device looks in hardware, depresses me. (I still want those pico projectors and remotes.)
Video after the break
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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I must say the dual projector idea is awesome! However the rest of the phone is slightly ugly IMO. Great concept but I think they need to make a few changes and it would be a killer phone!
What a geek of an article. What a waste. U sound geeky dude. Like ur not married and don't have kids an that's the only drama u have in ur life us an OS rant. Lol But hey, I read it right? Lololol
A few prob: 1 - a non rectangle screen => need to rewrite all the apps to make it work with this phone. 2- Shape causing weight unbalance (very thin at the bottom comparing to the top), will feel inconfortable in hand. 3 - useless plan and zoom in 3D space. why bother with a remote control when can do it directly with the finger on a touch screen? add a hardware between the will and the action is the oposit of what human need. (that is why people like so much touch screen comparing to mouse)
The two projecteurs are still a nice idea.
But its not just Android -- look closely at the bottom of the projected screen when the phone is in the mode where its projecting a virtual keyboard on the desk and a big screen on the blackboard -- that's not Android -- its Windows 7.
The Win7 start icon and folder icon are clearly visible in the lower left corner and the Windows 7 clock and system tray are at the bottom right. Its a dual OS phone!
Plus, it appears that this really isn't any sort of project that anyone is working on. I believe I read somewhere that the creator was having some fun with some new software and threw this together.
Wow! That's the funniest electric shaver I've ever seen. What's Mozilla been smoking?
i see it now, the embedded bluetooth cum mouse click and then the side projectors are next big design break after touchscreen
It's an inevitable outcome. Just like happened with PC OSes as the OSes progress and refine there is going to be less focus on the OS and more focus on the hardware and platform compatibility.
Great feature, ugly shape. However, it's just a concept of dream from humans imagination.
interesting concept and quite a silly rant. not only because it was inspired by a mere concept that is a) never going to happen and b) does not even put any emphasis on what kind of os it's supposed to run - i believe it shows android and windows simply because that saves them the trouble of mocking up something new.
also, i completely disagree with your rant. so you think that a dozen more new mobile os would be a good thing? there's a reason we only have 3 big operating systems for PCs/macs. it's called compatability. the same goes for mobile phones: how many different platforms are you willing to develop apps for? for many devs, the answer is "1" and that's iOS. many others are at least expanding their work to android since it's been gaining a lot of momentum lately, but apart from that? blackberry, once the most popular smartphone platform of them all, has a meager 1000 apps to offer. webos might count for a bit more if it wasn't relying on such crappy hardware. symbian, bada, meego and what have you don't even count at all.
the worth of a phone - or at least a decent smartphone - today is measured not in small parts by the amount of apps you can get for it, and for that reason, it simply makes sense for manufacturers to rely on systems that offer an already established market for such apps. nobody in his right mind buys a phone with an os on it that's not actively supported by a reasonable crowd of developers.
innovation in mobile os development is a good thing - but there's no reason it should happen on a multitude of different platforms.
Sorry, but I didn't see anything there but a hardware dump. Any of today's modern OS' can be updated to use these hardware adaptations. Sorry, but I don't see a wow factor there. You have a blue tooth device/mouse that displaces touch and virtual keyboard/touch area. But what's missing is what benefit is gained from using these input methods, what productivity improvement is there, what features there improve what we've seen from iOS, Android and webOS. I'm guessing that this is going to go as far as the Microsoft duel-tablet device that got geeks all fired up to the point that Mr. Softy had to back track and say that there's no real device planned based on that technology.
A philosophical rant. Awesome but I don't agree with it. There has been plenty of progress since iPhone OS 1.0. Why?
Symbian. Symbian's core has largely been rewritten in Symbian^3. Symbian^4 will appear next year and will feature a completely new user interface.
MeeGo with Nokia's Handset UX. Completely mobile-optimised Linux with a completely new, power-user targeted user interface.
WebOS. A very innovative user interface and a lot of unique features (Synergy, web "apps").
Windows Phone 7. The UI. XBox. Zune. Need I say more?
RIM. I will bet good money that they're doing a Microsoft and spending their time in the dessert. We'll see a completely new OS from them in the near future. Blackberry OS 6 is just their version of Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5
Last but not least, Apple. With the competition finally innovating, do you think Apple is just going to sit back and watch their advantage erode? No. Steve still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
@Will
No mention of Android? An no one wants a zune if they have a ipod, so yeaaa...
but this is just another artice Rene can throw his hatered of Android verizon and anything eles that poses a threat to ios of course.
Well Android is the basis of the article so I didn't put it in the list but yes, Android does bring a few innovations to the smartphone arena.
Dell, Lenovo, Sony et al should all be developing competing OSes? Sure. And maybe they should go one step further and develop a unique OS, or at least a unique API, for each model. Think about the innovation! Subdividing the market is fine for the providers. It raises the for barriers for consumers to switch products. It's been done in cell phones where no one can use their current phone on any competing network without (at least) losing major functionality. Switching from WM to Apple to Palm to Android to Mobile 7 likewise means replacing all purchased apps.
Maybe we should talk about ROI. With investment costs divided among a smaller number of items sold, ROI goes down and presumably product quality suffers as well. This is true for both application and OS providers.
The FCC put us at a disadvantage relative to the world market by pushing innovation over standardization and while our costs are higher there is no evidence that any of our alternatives are significantly superior to GSM.
Telecommunications is not an area where hand-made, one-off products are superior.
It would be just as clunky and unfinished as most of the Mozilla projects have become. How many years have we waited for calendering? Ugh.
Rene.. - This is the BEAUTY of Android... Mozilla can add so many software tweaks to Android and MAKE IT THEIR OWN ... kind of like HTC Sense.. The current version of Android took a lot of cue from HTC Sense... that's what happend with Android... Google puts out a verson of the OS .. Manufacturers make their own changes a la HTC sense or Touchwiz... some tweaks are great.. some are good .. others are horrible... but on the next version of ANdroid ... Google takes some cues from some of these manufacturers and add some features natively... and GOogle adds their own as well...
Also .. Developers like ADW launcher or Launcher pro ... add fucntionality for customers who want even more features ...
This is why Android is the IDEAL OS ...
A mozilla OS .. would just be fail.. nobody would care about it..
would buy this thing in a heartbeat.
This song is for Rene
Baby don't cry tonight......
@SpeedVX I don't think it's a dual phone. The phone was projecting a Windows machine, think of it a projector