mobile firefox

On September 12, 2011 at the Mozilla All Hands all the employees (lucky us, thanks Mozilla!)  each received a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (or an ASUS Transformer). First impressions of the Galaxy Tab:

• Heavy but useful as a great Google Reader client (I truly am addicted to Google Reader on all platforms: Firefox desktop, Android phone, iPhone and now Android tablet)
• Great PDF displayer as a second screen for reading e.g. programming books while programming while using a computer
• Built-in touch keyboard is not so great for me. Investigating Swype and Swiftkey
• Needs a case, I am afraid of dropping it, can anybody recommend a good case?
• Not nearly as much software as the iPad (I'd love something like World of Goo and Flipboard; Pulse is alright but :-) !)
• Firefox Mobile Nightly with the new Tab interface is very sweet. I could happily just use it and no other apps except Google Reader!

Hard to believe that I didn't make any predictions in 2009 (my 2008 predictions)!

Herewith again some randomly ordered Mobile predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

Mobile

1. Google will introduce a "comes with data" mobile phone featuring an easy environment to write HTML5 & JS apps
2. A Canadian mobile phone carrier will actually sell mobiles other than the iPhone that have current software & aren't 6-12 months old :-) The current "sell old phones with old firmware with bogus customizations" model of Rogers, Bell and Telus will be over in 2011.
   
3. Apple's tablet will be introduced, it wil be big seller and a great creator and consumer of multi-media and it will be closed and have the iPhone App Store model rather than the Mac app model.
4. Nokia will deliver Maemo 6 and an N900 successor but it won't be good enough for the mainstream but will be awesome for me & other mobile devs because mobile Firefox will offer superior HTML5 and JS experience (yes working for Mozilla I am biased :-) !)
5. The next iPhone will boast a 5 mega pixel camera and other still and video imaging improvements which will be more than good enough for old cameraphone snobs like me and accelerate Nokia's decline among mobile multimedia creators.
6. Mozilla Messaging (my employer!) will introduce a version of Raindrop that doesn't require you to do geeky things like install things like CouchDB yourself and it will rock on Android, Maemo and any other modern open mobile web  environment (sorry Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian but you lose since you are all neither open or modern or both :-) !) Just kidding, it will rock on any modern mobile web browser open or closed methinks :-) !