And now for something completely different — no Mediatek SoC, no Android OS, but a chinese device from ZTE. Say hi to the ZTE Open, one of the first available Firefox OS devices on the market.
I was interested in what this still young new mobile operating system has to offer and so i decided to buy a ZTE Open from ZTE’s UK ebay store (there is also a US and a HK store for the respective areas)
ZTE Open hardware
An SD card is required to use the camera
The ZTE Open is a 3.5inch device that measures 114x62x12.5 mm. Screen resolution is a meager HVGA (320×480), but nice and clear. The LCD is recessed pretty far but its not too distracting. 256 MB of Memory, 512 MB of Storage, expandable to 32GB by sd card. An SD card is required to use the camera or update the phone. Around 130MB of the internal storage is accessible for the user – but not for photos, music and such.
CPU is a single core, 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7225A. 1200mAh battery that lasts a ridiculously long time. 3.2 MP fixed focus back camera. Yes, the camera is as bad as it sounds – nice for lomography though :D
The usual bits and bobs like hardware sleep/on-off button on the top right, 3.5mm headphone/headset jack top left, volume rocker on the left side of the device, micro USB port on the bottom, nothing on the right. There is no front camera, only one capacitive touch button on the front.
The device supports:
- WLAN 802.11 b/g/n
- Bluetooth 2.1
- GPS with A-GPS
- FM-Radio
- standard SIM card (mini-sim)
- GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
- UMTS 900/2100 MHz (for the UK model, the US and HK model have different UMTS radios and frequencies)
- Proximity, ambient light sensor, gyroscope and gravity sensor
Take one step back, lets have a look what you get:
— A box covered in a very simple sleeve. The box itself is made very nice with the views of the phone printed on front and sides.
In the box:
- The ZTE Open phone
- A UK wall-plug
- USB cable
- Crappy headset
- Warranty information, safety information, a very nice quick start guide
there is no Google like integration into a cloud service.
I popped open the phone and inserted the battery to power her up for the first time. I unfortunately did not make any screenshots of the set up process, but its pretty straightforward and easy. It looks pretty similar to the first setup of an Android phone, just you do not enter any account information since there is no Google like integration into a cloud service.
Next, i downloaded the update from ZTE so i would have FirefoxOS 1.1. For the update you need to insert an SD Card and copy the update.zip there, boot to recovery (press and hold Power and volume up), install update from sdcard.
I played around with 1.1 for about 10 minutes before deciding to go all out and compile my very own 1.3 update. but that is another story and i’m sure you’ll read that here or on our forum soon.
http://www.chinaphonearena.com/forum/index.php
Here some screenshots of the bootup:
Cool boot animation, the tail of the fox is blazing.
As the specs suggest, the phone is low entry stuff. The screen is ok but not very responsive, though the situation improved when upgrading to Firefox OS 1.3.
Apps and OS
There is a range of standard apps like phone dialer, messaging, camera, gallery, fm radio, Marketplace, calendar, clock, usage, email, music, video, Nokia’s HERE maps and of course a browser (Firefox, who would have guessed…). There is also a settings app and a pull down menu like in Android.
all the back/menu etc. are provided by the apps themselves
I won’t go too much into detail of using the phone, since it is pretty much the same as with Android. There are minor differences, like there is only a single home button (the circle you see in the pictures above which is touch sensitive and lights up) all the back/menu etc. are provided by the apps themselves (like in iOS).
Holding the home button will get you the active apps and you can change between them or close them by swiping up or clicking on the x.
The apps themselves are of course HTML5, either locally installed or web pages.
The phone is fast enough for what it can do right now.
You’ll have your own computing environment with you at all times
There is one feature i want to expand on a little, since it’s really nice and handy:
You can turn on USB sharing of the sdcard in the settings, which essentially turns your phone into an USB stick. With this functionality you can install a linux live cd on it and boot a computer/laptop directly from it. You’ll have your own computing environment with you at all times (well, at least if you carry the phone around all the time that is).
Firefox OS is based on AOSP (4.0.4 as it seems) and so much in the background is the same as with Android.
In very basic terms, the OS is made up of these pieces:
- Gonk – this is basically the linux/android background and HAL
- Gecko – the browser engine and services layer
- Xulrunner – no idea really, probably the framework for anything xul…
- Gaia – the “front-end” if you will – the UI and HTML5 layer
if you want to know all the bits and pieces you should go have a look at the Mozilla Developer Network, pretty much everything is described there. ->
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS
As a teaser for the build report here are some screenshots with Firefox OS 1.3 installed (this is currently the stable release, but because it has not been made available yet for partners like ZTE there is no official update yet. – that’s also why if you self-build it’s still “prerelease”)
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