ZTE has today released a budget smartphone officially through eBay in the United Kingdom and United States.
The ZTE Open will sell for £59.99/$79.99 as a ‘Buy it Now’ on the e-tail website and the simplistic smartphone runs the new Mozilla Firefox OS. It comes with a diminutive 3.5-inch 480 x 320 pixel touchscreen display and entry level specs include a single core Qualcomm MSM7225A processor, 256MB of RAM and 512MB of storage.
The ZTE Open handset is equipped with a 3.2-megapixel camera and connectivity in the form of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A range of helpful apps are included from the start and there is access to the growing Firefox Marketplace which encourages developers to try their hand at creating and submitting apps for the fledgling operating system.
The popularity of the third leading web browser has lead Mozilla into the mobile arena with Chinese budget mobile manufacturers ZTE providing the hardware. We think it’s a smart move to test the market with a very basic and inexpensive handset sold through a platform like eBay that is quick and convenient and that most of us are familiar with.
Sony also looks set to take on Firefox OS next year, potentially bringing Mozilla’s OS to premium smartphones.