Doubletalk: Geeksphone Revolution dual-OS smartphone

'Micro SD storage expansion and a removable battery'

They must have read the forums here.

Dual OS

It'd be nice if it were dual boot instead of dual OS... Perhaps Mozilla need to do something about that to get momentum for Firefox OS.

The Revolution will be Firefoxed

I used to use a ZTE Open. It was my first smartphone, and it was okay.

I now use a Revolution with Firefox OS (technically Boot2Gecko/B2G, likely for some licensing reason). Compared to the ZTE Open it's dreamy-smooth (which is not saying much, admittedly), and certainly a better platform for seeing what Firefox OS is capable of (or not).

Hardware-wise, I'd say it was... quirky. The power button is on the top, but on the left side - which is the opposite to what I remember from all other phones I've seen. Having the microUSB slot on the left side (about 1/4 of the way down) is just weird. And, on my unit at least, the volume-down button seems somewhat mis-aligned, in that it is difficult to activate and has no "clunk". However, the volume-up part is fine.

And in case anyone is wondering; it uses a micro-SIM, not a nano-SIM as some early (p)reviews reported.

OS-wise, it shows that Firefox OS, while very functional for the basics, is still a WIP - in terms of both feature-set and the presence of minor bugs and irritations. The new wallpapers in 1.3, featuring the fire-fox itself, are great though.

So the Revolution is certainly not a bad phone, but personally, if I were looking to get a new Firefox OS phone and didn't absolutely need one this week, I'd wait and see how the Flame (the upcoming official developer phone) stacks up.

Given who makes the OS, unsurprisingly, the web browser is impressively efficient.

Considering my last experiences with FF, it IS a bit of a surprise to me!

Calling it geeksphone isn't going to endear it to many.

Still if someone say "that's a geeks phone" you can at least say "I know".

GPU?

It looks like it's PowerVR from what little I've found. That is a deal breaker for me because of the state of PowerVR drivers. There is no open drivers for PowerVR. Everyone seams to scream and run when they look at starting one. No open drivers means it won't work for long, least not with a modern kernel. Then you get those locked old dependencies spreading out across userspace like some kind of freezing death.

It is my firm hope that one day, every Linux distro with have a selection of phone UIs and apps to choose from, and we can all pick and mix. But only with open drivers is this possible.