News - ZTE Open Firefox OS smartphone will be an eBay exclusive

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The smartphones will be available on both UK and US eBay sites, priced £59.99 ($79.99).

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Read more.

'Discover a new way to surf the web' on a 480 x 320 screen, slowly with lots of scrolling I think.

The price is right for a cheap phone, but the specs may damage the reputation of the OS.

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Originally Posted by jimbouk

'Discover a new way to surf the web' on a 480 x 320 screen, slowly with lots of scrolling I think.

The price is right for a cheap phone, but the specs may damage the reputation of the OS.

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True - A better spec and I might have been tempted even at double the price. Doesn't need a 8 core CPU or 2Gb ram I'm sure but a half decent screen is a must.

I think they want it to be cheap though...cheap Android phones always suffer compared to the next tier up

SCreen resolution is very bad and the camera is also poor.

Always good to see a new competitor in the OS market, but agree with others, resolution and low res screen will do it no favours.

For nearly all phones under £150 the internal memory kills it for me, there's not enough space to load any additional apps. I've had issues previously trying to download apps to SD card and most of them won't run properly or require some sort of fudge to get them to work.....it should be standard and require zero additional input from the user.

Hmm, price is probably reasonable given the spec, but I can't help thinking that they'd have been better advised to try and sell (SIM-free and bundled with a SIM) via the supermarkets.

Second point, I can't see the networks being that impressed by an "open ecosystem" - from what I've seen, they'd be much happier with an OS that was locked down tighter than the proverbial ducks waste outlet.

As always it'll be down to the developers, if they come on board then it's likely to do well. If not, then it'll be less successful than webOS was in the phone arena.

i agree with the other post the specs are very low even for to day standards. but there will all way be room for improvements with the way the tech is advancing in our world.

The screen really might not be bad at all; it's 3.5" and I've used a similar screen on an Ace before my Nexus 4. Sure, you have less room to work, but provided it's reasonable quality it should be perfectly usable. And lets not forget it's a £60 phone!! If you want premium features, pay premium price! :P

TBH I find the technically higher PPI AMOLED screen on the SIII mini to be far more grainy than the IPS screen on the Ace. Sometimes looks like each pixel has a black border around it.

Starting out with a lower-end phone might not be a bad idea TBH, a several hundred pound phone with a new OS might put people off. People may be more likely to grab one of these to give it a go, etc. I'm tempted myself TBH.

It looks like a good OS. No doubt it will have it's teething problems early on but I expect it will come out shining. All it needs is the right hardware to help it sell, not this.

I can't wait to be rid of my Scroogle powered data thieving OS.

And go to somebody else's data thieving OS?

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Originally Posted by 3dcandy

And go to somebody else's data thieving OS?

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Firefox havn't been known to steal peoples data for financial gain, and they still allow AdBlock software to run without issues. I would expect the same from their OS.

Adblock doesn't block all ads now though does it. I agree that Firefox is *probably* less likely to steal data than other OS's we could mention, but if you seriously believe that your data is 100% safe you're mistaken.

It's nice to see new competitors come out however, I don't see any staying as the current field is being helled through the apps people have already perchased. Thus moving to a new OS generally means perchasing £50 of new apps. The only place I see the phone making it is with Drug Dealers, Hitmen, and the Mafia. Becaue this is the best burner-phone it would seem.

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Originally Posted by 3dcandy

Adblock doesn't block all ads now though does it. I agree that Firefox is *probably* less likely to steal data than other OS's we could mention, but if you seriously believe that your data is 100% safe you're mistaken.

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Even if they do have an spying software on the OS, its so open (when compared to android) that it could all be removed easily

Good thing it's only £60, priced any higher it'd be a rip off. An A5 and 512MB is going to crawl along and that screen is terribly low resolution. It's going to make FFOS look utter pants.

They should have at least tried for something with a dual core A7 and 1GB, 8GB internal storage and a 800/854 x 480 screen. Even the Intel Lexington platform explicitly described as being an entry level baseline for emerging markets is much better than this.

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Originally Posted by kingpotnoodle

Good thing it's only £60, priced any higher it'd be a rip off. An A5 and 512MB is going to crawl along and that screen is terribly low resolution. It's going to make FFOS look utter pants.

They should have at least tried for something with a dual core A7 and 1GB, 8GB internal storage and a 800/854 x 480 screen. Even the Intel Lexington platform explicitly described as being an entry level baseline for emerging markets is much better than this.

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Most reviews point towards the OS being very smooth with little to no lag. Its Android that makes you think you need the high specs, when you don't. This OS runs HTML5 rather than Java so much more efficient than android. Windows Phone can also run just fine on a slightly higher CPU but with same RAM, and higher res screen. If they had added better specs like you suggest then it would be £100+ which people don't want. I wanted a cheap device to trial an OS, and ZTE delivered. Hopefully that chip is good for a reasonable OC to maybe 1.2GHz

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Originally Posted by Ksyruz

It's nice to see new competitors come out however, I don't see any staying as the current field is being helled through the apps people have already perchased. Thus moving to a new OS generally means perchasing £50 of new apps. The only place I see the phone making it is with Drug Dealers, Hitmen, and the Mafia. Becaue this is the best burner-phone it would seem.

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Be serious. Besides, there are <£10 phones you can buy if that's all you need - why go with a £60 smartphone?

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Originally Posted by kingpotnoodle

Good thing it's only £60, priced any higher it'd be a rip off. An A5 and 512MB is going to crawl along and that screen is terribly low resolution. It's going to make FFOS look utter pants.

They should have at least tried for something with a dual core A7 and 1GB, 8GB internal storage and a 800/854 x 480 screen. Even the Intel Lexington platform explicitly described as being an entry level baseline for emerging markets is much better than this.

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See previous post, you don't need 5 million PPI for a decent usable screen. There's no reason this shouldn't perform reasonably well provided you're not hoping to run a ton of intensive apps on it. If you need that, you spend more, simple.

I really don't get why people are getting so upset because a £60 phone isn't giving £600 specs? Find a similarly priced phone with meaningfully better specs...

£59.99 smartphone would sell in a supermarket but only on ebay!... Most people won't even know it exists.

Seems an interesting strategy, the first thing I am thinking is if its optimised to use that hardware/screen then it could work very well indeed.

I will say android isn't very kind to lower specs hence my reason for buying the lumia 520 its lightening quick for a budget smartphone.

I may have to buy one of these just for a look.

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Originally Posted by Chadders87

Firefox havn't been known to steal peoples data for financial gain, and they still allow AdBlock software to run without issues. I would expect the same from their OS.

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Sigh. First off Google is one of Mozilla Foundation's main backers, so if you're looking for an "evil free" experience then Firefox OS isn't it either. Secondly, who's to say that if you buy a carrier-provided phone (not SIM free) that it won't be data scraping with the best of them?

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Originally Posted by Wozza365

Even if they do have an spying software on the OS, its so open (when compared to android) that it could all be removed easily

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I really don't see how you can say that, try DDG'ing or Bing'ing "AOSP". The problem is not Android itself - according to the experts on xda it's the Google Apps that do it. So if you flashed with a 3rd party ROM and didn't install GApps package then your handset isn't going to be "calling home".

Saw an interesting commentary on FirefoxOS. Namely that it's probably what Android could have been if they hadn't decided to go with a Java-centric approach. Which given that Java is notorious flabby and sluggardly means that FirefoxOS is going to be lean and quick. Not that this would persuade me to get one - it's a curiosity and niche device, nothing more

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Originally Posted by watercooled

I really don't get why people are getting so upset because a £60 phone isn't giving £600 specs?

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That's missing the point of my original post, though other people do seem to be more concerned about MHz and MBs. I am concerned that, given the phone is selling itself on being something for the 'net', that the low resolution will give a poor user experience browsing most of the net and hence will damage the OS's reputation.

Hopefully the OS/apps are nice and light so the processor / ram requirements will be small, but you can't really get round the number of pixels on screen when trying to look at many pictures of funny cats with captions.

Yeah I can see where you're coming from, and that's not really what I was arguing against. It would be nice to see some sort of top-to-bottom launch for the OS, in order to show of its capabilities on the high end, and still allow people to buy in out of curiosity etc. But like I said, an expensive phone carrying an unproven OS could be a fair risk for the manufacturer, but maybe we'll see some re-purposed Android models, given time?

The screen doesn't have stellar resolution, but IMO it could be more than usable especially given the price range. While I was using my Galaxy Ace, the screen seemed OK TBH (like I said I prefer it over the better-on-paper SIII Mini screen), although the ARM11 CPU and limited RAM did limit functionality somewhat, especially if you tried to do a load of things quickly. IMO the OP phone could provide a good balance of features for an entry-level smartphone.

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Originally Posted by Wozza365

Most reviews point towards the OS being very smooth with little to no lag. Its Android that makes you think you need the high specs, when you don't. This OS runs HTML5 rather than Java so much more efficient than android. Windows Phone can also run just fine on a slightly higher CPU but with same RAM, and higher res screen. If they had added better specs like you suggest then it would be £100+ which people don't want. I wanted a cheap device to trial an OS, and ZTE delivered. Hopefully that chip is good for a reasonable OC to maybe 1.2GHz

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The OS might well be smooth, the OS on old Nokia Symbian phones I had with a similar level CPUs was smooth years ago so that's hardly some new achievement. The problems arose when I tried to doing anything beyond the built-in, anything "smartphone" like - for example web browsing was mind numbingly slow and frustrating, one cheeky gif and you're locked up waiting 5 minutes. It's probably fine as a feature phone but I suspect it will struggle if people try to do things you might expect to do on a new 2013 smartphone and that is not going to be a good showcase. It's fine at £60, that's the right price, but I just don't see it generating a rush of wow over FFOS.