ZTE to sell Firefox OS ZTE Open on eBay for £60

Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has revealed that it will sell the Mozilla Firefox OS-powered ZTE Open on auction site eBay, retailing at a price of £59.99 [$79.99].

The device, first revealed at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, features a 1GHz ARM Cortex A5 single-core processor design on a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7225A chip, 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM and a 3.5-inch screen. A 3.2-megapixel camera is also included, and the device contains 512MB of internal storage.

Alcatel and Spanish phone maker Geeksphone are also producing Firefox OS devices.

ZTE says it will offer the ZTE Open in Firefox-flavoured orange exclusively on eBay, and that the device will be unlocked to support all phone networks.

However, it's the Firefox OS operating system that could separate the device from the pack in the lower end of the smartphone market.

With native support for the likes of Twitter and Facebook, and with Nokia's Here Maps application also on-board, the HTML 5-driven nature of application creation on the platform makes it potentially hugely accessible for developers.

Li Gong, Mozilla senior vice president of mobile devices at ZTE said: "Mozilla is dedicated to moving the Web forward as a platform for innovation and building products that people love. We are pleased that now we will put the full power of the Web in even more people's hands.

"With a great potential user base, we know that even more developers around the world will create their apps with new APIs to stimulate an inspiring new wave of innovation."

Speaking to Computing at MWC earlier this year, Mozilla principal developer evangelist, Christian Heilmann, extolled the virtues of cheap Firefox OS devices as potential purchases for SMEs.

"For companies, the advantage would be in building company phones with only a few applications," said Heilmann. Even smaller companies - say, plumbing companies - could build a phone with only three apps on it, and if it falls into a toilet it's not as much problem as an iPhone.

"You also don't have malware and all the other problems you have in a closed environment. As apps are all CSS, HTML 5 and javascript, and ask the user before they can access anything, there can't be anything accessing calls and text in the background."

Another star of MWC 2013 - Ubuntu Mobile - is being taken to market by developer Canonical in the form of the Ubuntu Edge. Rather than eBay, Canonical has launched a hugely ambitious campaign on on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, hoping to raise $32m in one calendar month.

The total currently lies at $9.76m with only nine days to go, and this includes an unprecedented $80,000 pledge by financial information and news service Bloomberg last week.