A concept phone that needs to be reality immediately. The Mozilla Seabird

Brian Ambrozy 24 Sep, 2010 at 6:25pm ET Article published in Tech

The Mozilla Seabird, part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, is an experiment in how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances. Drawing on insights culled from the Mozilla community through the project’s blog, a focus quickly developed around frustrating physical interactions. While mobile CPUs, connectivity and development platforms begin approaching that of desktops, the lagging ability to efficiently input information has grown ever more pronounced.

All I can say after watching this is: Wow.

The dual pico projectors are one of those things that immediately jumps out and makes you think “Why hasn’t somebody done this yet?” In fact, this entire video opens up the floor to a lot of questions, primarily that of input on mobile devices and how we’re used to interacting with machinery.

Remember kids, this is a concept, and does not actually exist.

Comments

24 Sep 2010 ~ 7:23pm Annes I got a boner watching it. Just thought I'd share.
24 Sep 2010 ~ 7:54pm DrLiam I'd buy this over an iPhone ANYDAY. That's coming from someone who'd only buy an iPhone as their primary smart phone device. Very cool stuff. (Hoping this comes out in the next 5 years.)
24 Sep 2010 ~ 8:22pm ardichoke I would ditch my Nexus One for this (if it were well made and available on the cell network of my choice) in a heartbeat.
24 Sep 2010 ~ 8:40pm mondi Finally, a phone with advanced - "needs a bunch of space to use" functionality, whether it's a table, or space for arm gestures, to operate.

The upside is that you can dock it to get a low res, sheared display (with available wall), with a non tactile, distorted, "full size" keyboard (with available table).
24 Sep 2010 ~ 9:31pm Cliff_Forster Now, this is what a company should do when they are about to fight for their lives. Instead of running, whining, complaining, just innovate baby.

Anyone that follows tech closely knows the Mozilla foundation is going to be in allot of trouble when their Google revenue sharing agreement expires in 2011, and that makes up 90% of Mozilla's total revenue. Its a big deal. Now, Firefox has lots of cash for investment, though they are currently being investigated by the IRS... So that could change.

Mozilla needs to come out swinging to salvage what they built. With Chrome as an alternative browser, Google is not about to bleed a hundred million a year for an investment that yields them very little. What is Mozilla going to do? Direct you to Yahoo, no... Microsoft is in that camp... Build their own search engine.... no, its fruitless, Google has the mindshare in that market, and its just not going to change, Google is the Coca Cola of search, drink it up and love it, its not going anywhere.

What Mozilla does in 2011 essentially defines if they will even exist in 2012. After seeing this concept, I'd bet on them.... They have been a the #1 innovator in open source for years, frankly, far before it was fashionable, but they are going to need to fight to keep advancing the agenda. This is a huge first step. I'll be really pleased to see them step outside of their box.
24 Sep 2010 ~ 9:44pm primesuspect

Cliff wrote:

What Mozilla does in 2011 essentially defines if they will even exist in 2012.

Weird, it's a full moon, I get that... but that's twice in the same week that I find myself totally on the same page as Cliff
24 Sep 2010 ~ 11:26pm RyanMM I'd buy that for a dollar.
24 Sep 2010 ~ 11:30pm Winfrey $1.01 Bob
25 Sep 2010 ~ 1:36am Bandrik Holy crap. I want this. Two of them, actually, had I the funding and the chance.

Uhhh.... I think I need a change of pants. Right there, when the keyboard was projected on both sides on the phone with a virtual touchpad in front. Multiple ways to interact with a device. Why can't we have more of that?

I'll be right back. Going for new pants.
25 Sep 2010 ~ 6:18pm mirage Impressive concept. But requires an extremely challenging product development effort. I don't think Mozilla has the resources to handle this in the foreseeable future. Mozilla had to diversify its products in other markets, especially on mobile technologies. But this concept, I think, is too late and too big to handle at this stage.

At this time, Mozilla should be thinking about how to handle the growing competition from Chrome, Safari, and upcoming IE9, as well as gaining market share in the mobile (smart phone + tablet) platforms that they have completely missed. I agree with Cliff. I am not feeling good about the future prospects of my favorite browser. They are becoming irrelevant again just like it happened with Netscape. Netscape -> Mozilla -> ?
25 Sep 2010 ~ 7:36pm ardichoke IE isn't competition... it's a joke. I'll take that browser seriously the day that it starts properly conforming to standards in a timely manner. Chrome, however, is eating Firefox's lunch... and as much as I love FF, it really can't hold it's own against Chrome anymore in most cases sadly. I think they're in need of a major rewrite to freshen things up. Of course if they can't monetize it anyway, I guess it doesn't matter.

I can only hope that they partner with HTC (or another sensible hardware manufacturer) to produce the Mozilla phone and that it becomes a hit.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 11:51am Bandrik

ardichoke wrote:

Chrome, however, is eating Firefox's lunch... and as much as I love FF, it really can't hold it's own against Chrome anymore in most cases sadly.

I do really like Chrome when I want a lightweight "speedy" browser, but I've found that there's some key things that Chrome doesn't play nice with. For example, the Icrontic staff chat just doesn't work well in Chrome for me â€” some features are broken that work just fine in Firefox. So in short, I love Chrome, but I find Firefox to be more dependable.

So for now and the foreseeable future I'll continue to use Firefox as my main, and Chrome when I'm not feeling like waiting for FF and all my handy-dandy plugins to launch when I don't already have a browser open.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 11:51am Cliff_Forster I know the leadership at the Mozilla foundation was preparing for a change. They have built a nice war chest for themselves, now the question is how much the IRS will let them keep (I think its fairly clear they are no longer a non profit).

Mozilla is in a unique position. They have nearly 25% of the browser market share. Seriously, go back a few years, did you even think this could be done? Now, Microsoft is on the offensive, everyone seems to think IE9 is going to be special. Chrome may or may not be a better product, but its enough to tell you that Google's direction is no longer to partner with Mozilla. Thats 100 million a year they are going to pocket for their own browser development efforts.

Mozilla, has built so much. They really have changed the face of computing. They have brought awareness to open source, the have amassed a massive and brilliant development community, and have gotten past being just a browser for geeks, they are actually fairly mainstream. Allot of people love firefox, and for good reason, its been consistently pretty fantastic.

But.... The reality is this, the Google agreement is running out, they are going to loose their primary source of monetization, and, its fairly likely that the IRS is going to say, hey, that nice stock pile of cash for development, you owe us some of that... So... If you are Mozilla, you have to get outside of the browser box, some way or another. I could see them drop their non profit status, maybe even go public to monetize, and a showing like this could be to attract potential investors.

Like I said, I'd bet on them. I think some really smart people run that group, and I would not be surprised if in five years Mozilla is a household name, like Google, Microsoft and Apple. They are just going to need to change the way they do business, and, I think this demo shows they know that.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 12:04pm RyanMM

ardichoke wrote:

IE isn't competition... it's a joke. I'll take that browser seriously the day that it starts properly conforming to standards in a timely manner. Chrome, however, is eating Firefox's lunch... and as much as I love FF, it really can't hold it's own against Chrome anymore in most cases sadly. I think they're in need of a major rewrite to freshen things up. Of course if they can't monetize it anyway, I guess it doesn't matter.

I can only hope that they partner with HTC (or another sensible hardware manufacturer) to produce the Mozilla phone and that it becomes a hit.

Have you seen IE9? Its implementation of GPU acceleration is far more advanced than the next versions of Chrome and Firefox.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 12:08pm Bandrik

RyanMeray wrote:

Have you seen IE9? Its implementation of GPU acceleration is far more advanced than the next versions of Chrome and Firefox.

What you say? IE got sexy?

(I corporate competition.)
27 Sep 2010 ~ 1:00pm Thrax IE9 and Firefox 4 both use Direct2D for font smoothing, page rendering and SVG acceleration. How is either one more advanced than the other?
27 Sep 2010 ~ 1:05pm RyanMM I'm just going off of what I've read, which at this point is Microsoft's claims. Take them with a grain of salt.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368987,00.asp

Microsoft claims it's because their nascent browser is using graphics hardware to accelerate page composition and the final desktop window composition as well as just content rendering. According to Johnson, "Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both."
27 Sep 2010 ~ 1:51pm mirage After using IE9, I remembered the feeling after upgrading Vista to Windows 7. Such a polished, snappy browser compared to IE8. It feels very much like Chrome. I think it will steal more Chrome users than Firefox. I have switched to Firefox 4 since beta 5 and it became my default browser. There is no other browser that can be customized and expanded as much as Firefox. I tried all of the other browsers and always went back to Firefox.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 6:10pm Snarkasm

RyanMeray wrote:

I'm just going off of what I've read, which at this point is Microsoft's claims. Take them with a grain of salt.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368987,00.asp

Quoting a Moz developer from a while back, "Wrong, wrong, wrong."

The facts are that Firefox takes advantage of the same Windows 7 APIs that Microsoft does to accelerate both the compositing and the rendering of Web content and that Mozilla provided test builds of Firefox, for folks like you, me, and Michael Muchmore, with this hardware acceleration well before Microsoft did.

I'm not particularly interested one way or another (I use Chrome primarily now, I suppose), but the PCMag article is just entirely wrong.
27 Sep 2010 ~ 9:54pm photodude The future of Mozilla is a Google buy out. They fit the profile, and an innovative design idea like this seabird phone, is something that could tip the scales. I think google buy's Mozilla in 2011 and dumps this concept on the next android phone as a serious competition to the iPhone5.
28 Sep 2010 ~ 4:26pm ardichoke Google has no real reason to buy Mozilla out. Google already has a browser that is fully capable of competing with Firefox (some would argue it is already superior to Firefox). With GMail and Google Calendar, they don't have a need for Thunderbird or Sunbird/Lightning. I really see no reason that Google would want or need to acquire Mozilla.
28 Sep 2010 ~ 8:09pm Bandrik

ardichoke wrote:

Google has no real reason to buy Mozilla out.

I agree. While I can see Google possibly making some use of what's under Mozilla's roof, I don't think it would be nearly worth it.

And honestly, as much as I like our soon-to-be overlords Google, I really would rather they not get involved directly with Mozilla. Both companies have their own agendas and interests. They should remain that way.
28 Sep 2010 ~ 8:21pm fatcat <object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ocRE9aarplI?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ocRE9aarplI?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

oh wait, off topic. nvm
29 Sep 2010 ~ 1:21pm Snarkasm lol opera

Good one, FC!
29 Sep 2010 ~ 1:43pm patrickcabenjamin I'm running off Opera right now.
It's Fast.
1 Oct 2010 ~ 1:33am DrLiam I tried Opera for a few days after watching that posted video but I wasn't too impressed. Opera still feels awkward and there were a few bugs I encountered which was a huge turn-off.

Funnily enough, after using Opera I switched from Firefox to Chrome. Go figure.