ZTE Open Firefox OS

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Earth[Tera].bin

Soldato
Joined
12 Sep 2007
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Just purchased one of these for £60, ZTE UK has a special orange colour up for auction on eBay and they're being snapped up, over 800 sold in the last few days.

Mines is due for delivery on Tuesday and will update with first impressions.

CPUU 1.0 GHz Cortex-A5
Chipset Qualcomm MSM7225A Snapdragon
GPU Adreno 200
OS Firefox OS
Memory 512 MB ROM, 256 MB RAM
Support Micro SD Card, up to 32GB(No memory card include)
Screen 3.5" TFT 320 x 480 Pixels
TFT Capacitive Screen
Network 3G Network: HSDPA 900/2100
2G Network: GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Audio 3.5MM headphone jack
Support M4A, MP,OGG and Other Formats (play from Core player)
Support M4A,MP3,WAV,MIDI,OGG and Other Formats (codec in phone)
Video Support Video Player, MP4, ASP and other formats (play from Core player)
Support Video Player, avi, MP4, ASP and other formats (codec in phone)
Wlan Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band
Camera Back 3.15 MP
Support Maximum 2048x1536 Resolution
Picture Formats Support JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and Other Formats
Dimensions 114 x 62 x 12.5 mm
Battery Li-Ion 1200 mAh battery
Click to expand...

Thought some would appreciate the heads up.
 
Bought mine Friday, was posted today, Hopefully should be in my hands tomorrow.

At the very worst it will be a good phone for the parents to drag them off their ancient nokias, the screen should be easier on their old eyes.
 
Also got one of these on order.
was mainly just curious to see what it is like for the money, but also potentially parent friendly it is too!
 
loltim said:
256mb ram? no thanks
Click to expand...

I am amazed by how well it performs considering the RAM. The OS must be incredibly light. The browsing experience (on mobile sites) is probably as good as on my Galaxy S3. Admittedly it slows down a lot on big complex desktop sites but the size of the screen means you really don't want to be looking at those much anyway.

Swissy said:
All sold out ?

Dam my i will order it later approach
Click to expand...

Rumour suggests another batch of phones for ebay in September.
 
Ignoring the RAM (may not be an issue when we see how the OS handles memory), but the rest of the specs are disappointing. The screen in particular.. it'd be poor for a watch!
 
I'm happy to give my general impressions:

Overall I'd say that it is quite a bit better than what you would expect for a £60 smart phone. It works extremely well in some ways but is very limited in others. It is worth baring in mind that this is £60 without any carrier subsidies as well...

It is a great buy for a first time smartphone owner, a backup phone or just something to tinker around with. It will be a truly fantastic buy once some issues are addressed (particularly with the keyboard).

Just don't expect too much from it and you will be happy.

Hardware

Screen - the screen is fine. If you are used to a top end phone then it is a considerable step down and reminds you why you are paying so much for your current phone. Moving from my Galaxy S3 to this is a bit of a shock! The resolution is fine for viewing websites etc. After a while I got used to it. The main problem I have with it is the brightness. It is fine for indoor stuff but is not very visible in bright sunlight.

Storage - there is only 512MB of storage built into the phone. However the Firefox OS apps are tiny so this will go much much further than it would on an android device. Additionally it will take a 32GB SD card (a 4GB card comes free with the phone). This is very welcome. Given the music apps available this might actually make a very decent and reasonably priced smart mp3 player even without all of the other functionality. More on that later.

RAM - only 256MB of RAM. But the phone is FAR more responsive than you would expect a phone with this amount of RAM to be. Switching between several open apps works well. The OS is so light that I don't think I ever had the issue, so common on Android phones, of the home screen taking ages to launch up after exiting a RAM heavy app.

Battery - I've not used it all that much with a SIM inserted but the battery seems to last well. Probably better than my Galaxy S3.

GPS - this is a bit of a disappointment. It only really works outdoors. But once you are out there it works fine.

Bluetooth - I've not tested it.

FM Radio - nice to have. Works well. Needs to have headphones plugged in to work.


Software

OS and basic apps - All work very well. Messaging, email dialler etc are all just what you would expect them to be. Basic and not much customisation available but for a phone like this it really isn't necessary. They are quick to use despite the tiny amount of RAM. All clearly very lightweight. I like the Firefox OS styling overall. It is simple and attractive. The music app is particularly nice looking and works well.

HERE Maps - Works well. Provides directions for driving walking and public transport. Also allows you to cache maps for offline use.

Browser - as you would expect the browser is really good. Probably as good as my S3 for viewing mobile pages. Very fast. But the lack of RAM begins to tell quickly on desktop webpages. They will load quite a bit more slowly.

3rd Party Apps - Somewhat confusingly there are 3 ways to install 3rd Party Apps on Firefox OS:-

  1. Firefox Marketplace - Exactly what you would expect at this early stage. Some big names (Facebook, Twitter etc) but also some missing (no youtube). Some promising games but also a lot of fairly low quality apps - BMI calculators etc.
  2. Adaptive App Search (Everything.me) - this has a lot of potential and offers a nice way to discover web apps that you might not have found otherwise. Goes a long way to plugging the holes in the Marketplace (youtube and google maps are available via this route). Also grooveshark html5 works very well. The downside is that not all apps here are 100% compatible. I've come across a few that don't work all that well on the Open. This is a minority though.
  3. Pin Webapps from browser - this helps even more with filling in the blanks. Any website can be pinned from the browser. It then appears on the home screen as an app. When it opens it does so with almost no browser chrome so that it really does feel like an app to use. I've used this for London transport journey planner and bus tracker web apps. Both work well.

Limitations

For me the main issue that I have with recommending Firefox OS to anyone as their main phone is the keyboard. It is currently a very basic qwerty soft keyboard. There is no word prediction / auto-correct at all. However I believe this will be addressed in a future version.

Also Whatsapp is currently missing from the marketplace. This will be a big deal for some. Not so much for others.

Advantages

Software updates should come very rapidly. Mozilla are planning to ship a new version every quarter and security updates every 6 weeks.

Also see here for pcmag review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2423926,00.asp

I'll post more if I can think of anything more!

If you are interested I would go ahead and buy it. Have a play and see what you think.
 
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It looks like a good phone to me as it's been designed well to run on low powered hardware. For £60 it sounds like an excellent buy.

Thanks for your great feedback.
 
GPS doesn't seem to work at all well on mine, I think maybe I need to stand outside for a while but I did so for about 10 minutes and still didn't have a lock.

Creating HTML5 apps is pretty simple though, and lots of example code out there.

However I see ZTE are selling a budget Windows Phone 7.5 device on eBay for just a tenner more, to be honest apart from getting the Firefox one out of interest if I was actually buying a device in this price range I'd stretch to the Windows Phone one without a second thought.
 
Em3bbs said:
However I see ZTE are selling a budget Windows Phone 7.5 device on eBay for just a tenner more, to be honest apart from getting the Firefox one out of interest if I was actually buying a device in this price range I'd stretch to the Windows Phone one without a second thought.
Click to expand...

I don't have any experience with very low powered Windows phones. I'd be very surprised if the OS / basic apps performed as well as the FF OS ones. But there would be a better range of apps on windows phone (for now).

I guess it depends what the priorities are.
 
WP7.5? That's old and outdated now. If you want a windows phone get lumia 520/620 or Huawei W1. All wp8 and will receive future updates.
 
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