ZTE Open, the first Firefox OS phone, launches tomorrow for €69

We knew Firefox OS was meant as a low-cost alternative to expensive high-end smartphones, but we didn’t know they would come for this low a price.

Nikhil Subramaniam|Jul 01, 2013, 19:35:30 IST

We knew Firefox OS was meant as a low-cost alternative to expensive high-end smartphones, but we didn’t know exactly how cheap the first phones would be. Now we do. ZTE will start selling Open, the first Firefox OS phone from tomorrow, in Spain.

The price of the handset is 69 euros (approx Rs 5,600). For that price, there’s even 30 euros worth of pre-paid talk time bundled along with the phone. So this will bring some touch competition to low-cost Android alternatives, not to mention S40 and Asha feature phones by Nokia.

The ZTE Open is powered by a Cortex A5 processor clocked at 1GHz and has 256MB of RAM. The 3.5-inch display comes with a low resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. There is a 3.15 megapixel camera on the back. The phone looks very simple with a plastic exterior and a rounded body. Although we reckon, it’s a well-designed device considering the low price.

The first Firefox OS phone, the ZTE Open

The key specs of the ZTE Open include:

3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 480
3G (HSPA up to 7.2Mbps), GPRS/EDGE
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
GPS with A-GPS support
3.15 megapixel primary camera
512MB internal storage with microSD card slot and 2GB card in the package

Firefox OS uses HTML5-based apps and these will be available through the Firefox Marketplace. It will come with social networking apps for Facebook and Twitter, Nokia’s HERE maps service, Box cloud storage, marquee games from EA Mobile and Disney Mobile Games.

Firefox Marketplace apps will be powered by cloud services to enable easy transition across devices and platforms. It will have popular apps such as AccuWeather, Airbnb, Pulse News, SoundCloud, SporTV, Terra and Time Out, as well as tailored, local apps that are relevant to users in their respective regions. Web developers can also turn a website into an HTML5 app through Mozilla's development kit. Firefox OS supports video calling over Web RTC, a browser-based technology that's also available on the Android Firefox Aurora app.