Bob
Well-known member
Back in February at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow a plethora of carriers pledged their support for Mozilla’s HTML-5 open web mobile platform, Firefox OS, which is hoping to shake up the low-end smartphone segment. Today, the launch date of the first commercial Firefox OS phone has been confirmed: the ZTE Open will go on sale tomorrow in Spain, on Telefonica’s Movistar network.
The handset will cost €69 (around $90), which includes a pre-pay balance of €30 for prepaid customers plus a 4GB microSD card. The carrier is also offering an option of zero interest financing for post-paid customers. IHS Screen Digest analyst Ian Fogg described the pricing as “very compelling, commenting on the launch via Twitter: “Featurephones are dead, finally… Now there’s no price reason not to own a smartphone.”
Telefonica said it also plans to offer the handset in additional markets “ in the coming weeks” – name-checking Colombia and Venezuela. When it announced support for Firefox OS back in February it said its first Firefox-powered phones would be sold in Latin America and Spain. In the event, Spain gets first dibs. Also today, Telefonica confirmed the ZTE Open will be the first of “a number of Firefox OS devices” it will launch this year — “across a range of different price points”. Which suggests it’s also hoping to challenge Android’s expansive mid-tier, although this first handset sits firmly in the low end segment.
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The handset will cost €69 (around $90), which includes a pre-pay balance of €30 for prepaid customers plus a 4GB microSD card. The carrier is also offering an option of zero interest financing for post-paid customers. IHS Screen Digest analyst Ian Fogg described the pricing as “very compelling, commenting on the launch via Twitter: “Featurephones are dead, finally… Now there’s no price reason not to own a smartphone.”
Telefonica said it also plans to offer the handset in additional markets “ in the coming weeks” – name-checking Colombia and Venezuela. When it announced support for Firefox OS back in February it said its first Firefox-powered phones would be sold in Latin America and Spain. In the event, Spain gets first dibs. Also today, Telefonica confirmed the ZTE Open will be the first of “a number of Firefox OS devices” it will launch this year — “across a range of different price points”. Which suggests it’s also hoping to challenge Android’s expansive mid-tier, although this first handset sits firmly in the low end segment.
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Android isn't really designed for the bottom-end, it functions best with (comparatively) lots of memory and a meaty CPU. There are a lot of budget Android smartphones, but they tend to suffer for it.
