The more interesting part of OLPC's history, is that not only did the OLPC never quite get there on price, but it was pushing the 'wrong' platform. What the for-profit industry ultimately delivered to that end of the market, that has seemingly been a far bigger hit than $100 laptops, was something completely different and fundamentally more well-matched to users with no legacy computing experience/needs. [1]
It's entirely possible that a $25 smartphone will still be junk [2] until well after some other platform is created, polished and delivered to those users.
[1] Touch-based phones and tablets
[2] that is, flawed-enough that feature-phones and used phones are preferable to the experience provided by a 'new' $25 smartphone.
I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it.
A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there.
I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.
But the price will get there soon with or without Mozilla. Android phones are already readily available at <$40. Give it another year and chances are they'll hit $25 anyway.
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1].
The problem with flagship phones is the screens, which are high res enough that GPU acceleration of the user interface is mandatory for decent performance. Doing good enough GPU side rendering of web content is an unsolved problem, and if your devs are having to worry about it (as many mobile web devs already do) you've lost the point of using the web stack in the first place.
In the end, what killed the OLPC was politics, not product execution. And the initiative was widely sucessfull, just in a way that was different from the stated roadmap.
Mozila is in a similar situation here. If somebody else make a device that replace their phones, they'll probably see it as sucess.
I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.