First Firefox OS Smartphone ZTE Open on Sale

Mozilla’s first Firefox OS smartphone, the ZTE Open, went on salein Spain through Telefonica. The low-cost smartphone was first announced last week, but faced slight delays that kept the 69 euro ($89) handset from hitting stores until Tuesday. The device is also headed to Poland, Columbia and Venezuela in the near future, Mozilla noted in a blog post. The company also launched the Firefox OS simulator today, in an effort to help developers test out new apps intended for the open-source operating system.

The ZTE Open comes equipped with a 3.5-inch TFT display with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, 2GB of memory upgradeable to 32GB via microSD card, 265MB of RAM, a Qualcomm MSM7225A Snapdragon processor, FM radio, GPS, a 1,200 mAh battery and a 3.15-megapixel rear camera. No front-facing camera is included. The handset comes in either blue or orange.

Mozilla has also announced the Alcatel One Touch Fire, which runs Firefox OS as well and comes equipped with similar specs but sports a Qualcomm MSM7227A processor and a 1,400 mAh battery. The Alcatel handset comes in either Mozilla Orange, Apple Green or Pure White. It’s unclear when and where it will be available for purchase.

Looking at the specs, it's clear that the ZTE Open is a rather modest, low-end smartphone aimed at the budget end of the market. It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7225A SoC, which has a Cortex A5 CPU with unmentioned clock speed (it could be either of the supported 600 or 800MHz) and Adreno 200 GPU, 3.5-inch, HVGA capacitive touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel fixed focus rear camera, 512MB of storage memory and 256MB of RAM, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, GPS, FM Radio and a 1,200mAh battery.

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