Yet another Smartphone OS in an already crowded market? Is there a breathing gap for platforms with differentiated offerings? So many questions needed answering when the Firefox OS was announced. And now it is here, residing within a handful of devices. Firefox OS might be the litmus test for a new OS’ sustainability in a fiercely competitive market. And for sustainability, any OS needs hardware, and tailored ones are the demand of the day. So Firefox announced their partnerships with several manufacturers for manufacturing low cost devices to push their platform forward to the ideal first smartphone user segment. ZTE is one of them, and one of their first devices featuring the Firefox OS is the ZTE Open.
The name Open signifies Firefox’s mobile vision in a word. The platform is based on web technologies, and much like Firefox, the browser, most apps it has run on HTML5 or Javascript. Previously we had seen phones or apps based on web technologies didn’t perform that well, and that was exactly the case with FFOS too, when we had last seen the ZTE Open at the MWC event. But, has it changed, is it smoother and usable now? We unbox this low cost device to find out –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJqRx0-KyVY
The box contents are the usual stuff, with cheap looking components as you’d expect from a low cost smartphone. The ZTE Open doesn’t surprise or disappoint.
The box comes with the bright orange coloured phone, the micro USB cable, the USB travel charger, bundled earphones with mic and a bunch of information booklets about the new OS, safety and the warranty card. It might be a good option to read through the blue user manual for a quick guide of the Firefox OS, eventhough it should be very familiar from the first instant.
For a low cost phone, the device is nicely made. With a dash of orange, the plastic phone does look like a toy, but feels less like one. The back cover is removable and is matte, and underneath the cover is the mini SIM card slot and the micro SD slot. There is no phone memory for taking photos, so the first thing you’d need to do is install a micro SD card, but the phone can boot up without a SIM card, as we have shown above.
There is a fixed focus 3.2 MP camera on the back, not pictured above, but what we actually wanted to show you is the colour and the plastic quality. With the Firefox logo being predominantly orange, we can understand what the thinking must have been for the ZTE Open to be in a similar colour. The device feels compact too, thanks to the 3.5 inch screen with a HVGA resolution. Hello, old iPhone specifications. The star is the software and from the video above you can see what the FF team has made strides, after what was considered a dismal show at MWC. The OS feels fast for a legacy Snapdragon S1 processor but the clunky web-like animations still exist, signaling more work is indeed needed for the OS to perform well on low end hardware. That said, we will be taking a look at the OS as well as the device in more detail in our full review, so do keep an eye on our blog for that.
More pictures of the box contents –
