I am really tempted to buy one of these but I am currently torn between this and a cheap android phone. I find myself using the "smart" features on my phone less and less mainly due to the fact I have been trying to lessen my addiction to technology and being "always connected". Ideally I would like to spend around £100. I have also been looking at the Lumia 520 but I am not too keen on Windows Phone. All I really need it for is a basic browser (I don't do much browsing on my phone), mp3 player and maps. Everything else I can live without. Firefox OS does all I need it is just the reviews of the hardware on the ZTE Open are pretty poor. Suggestions welcome :)
For what it's worth, the Windows Phone OS for me has been great (Nokia 925). The maps will be much better on the 520 than the Firefox OS Phone, and you can download them do your device so you don't have to have internet for navigation to work. The new mobile IE is fast and comparable to the others, but one thing that I don't like is that a tap doesn't count as a mousedown like it does on the built-in android browser so some menus don't work on the desktop version of some sites.
Yeah I am going to pop into Carphone Warehouse this weekend and have a good play with the 520. Visually I quite like Windows Phone but I want to try it out in person. I also need to check out the apps available for it. Obviously it is poor compared to iOS and Android but as long as it covers the few areas I need I should be happy.
this is the single worst accessibility issue on most browsers. Android is the only one who gets it right (and i guess mozilla now as well). but for microsoft and apple to still not provide this functionality is just mind blowing.
I'm also between a cheap android and this. Anyone know of any few-year-old phones that'll run 4.1? $200-250 is around what I'm hoping to pay.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions guys, I'm a tad sketched out by the no-name chinese copies. They look good, but you have to wonder whether they go through decent QA processes and have to comply with the same safety laws as phones sold in the US.
Earlier this year I've purchased Geeksphone Peak, which was just sitting on my desk doing nothing special... Few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a tutorial on how to install Android on Peak, I did it and it works stable and great since then :) To be honest, in some situations it works better then my Galaxy S3 with stock ROM (probably my storage on s3 got slower over time, since I own it for more than 1 year)
The "no-name Chinese copies" are in many cases really good. I have a Star B92m, which is roughly a Galaxy S III copy. It is slower, and slightly different port layout (which is annoying, as otherwise it is perfect dimensions to fit all cases etc.). Apart from that the only problem is that the GPS antenna is way too short, so if GPS matters to you you pretty much need to open the phone and mod it. Other than that it's an excellent phone.
The B92m is last years model, and I bought it for about $240 at the time. This year you can get quad core full hd (1920x1080) phones for the same price.
Basically it is down to reading reviews in advance to ensure the features you care about works as they should.
Safety is really not a concern when it comes to the phone itself - if you're worried, throw away the charger and pick up any USB charger you trust more.
Overall keep in mind that most of these "copies" are only copies or imitations of better known brands on the surface - if you open them up what you tend to see is boards that are closely following the same reference boards for either MTK (Taiwanese fab-less manufacturer; one of the worlds largest semiconductor companies), Rockchip or AllWinner (Cinese mainland) CPUs.
You can pick up devices from dozens of different manufacturers and find boards that are close to (or totally) identical in most of the ones using the same SOCs. In the case of AllWinner at least, chances are the devices are designed by close partners of AllWinner - I'm assuming the same is the case for MTK and Rockchip.
The upside of this is that it's not like some random little outfit have actually designed most of the internals of most of these phones - they're largely well tested designs from well established large engineering companies. Most of them are also very simple, relying on MTK, AllWinner or Rockchip SOCs that embed most of the functionality in a single package, so the boards often just break out ports and have minor supporting circuitry which is presumably a big reason why they're so popular with this market segment.
I bought a ZTE v970 for 130 euro on pandawill. It's fast, good size and runs the latest android. You'll find loads more Chinese phones if you research well :)
Nexus 4 is only $249 for the 16G version Surely some are on craigslist or google may still be selling them directly Good phone to make custom Roms for or for building AOSP
$249 was Google's closeout price and inventory disappeared. A new Nexus 4 seems to go for $360+. eBay has used ones in various conditions and they seem to be $260+.
Maybe when the Nexus 5 ships, the resellers will lower their prices. Or just sell in countries with inflated retail prices.
I have and use the following phones iPhone 1, Nexus 4, Nokia 520, ZTE Open.
I really like the ZTE Open and am switching to it for full time use. But I'd generally advise at this stage most people would not be happy to do this. The touch screen is unresponsive, the phone is generally sluggish and the range of apps is limited. The apps that are there have limited functionality. I think it would be a much better experience built with say LuaJIT and FFI and a kernel of C routines for heavy lifting in apps. But it is what it is, and ultimately I'm a big fan of the experiment Mozilla is undertaking using Web technologies to deliver such a platform - but its going to be a long road. Part of this is also colored by my experiences developing for Android and iOS.
The reason I'm switching is that I prefer to carry a cheaper phone around, and I only need very basic services (basically happy to receive phone calls, and send texts and occasionally browse to a web page in an emergency). I am also very impressed philosophically with what Mozilla is trying to achieve here. I almost returned the Nexus 4 and Nokia 520 when I got them because it is very difficult to set them up without getting funnelled into over sharing your private information with cloud services.
My second choice of phone would be the Nokia 520 for pure value for money. But my view is only an iPhone or an Android device have first class web browsing capabilities and first class app ecosystems. Go with the Nokia 520 and its a reasonable (if simple phone), but does the basics (_except_ notification) well.
My third choice is my old iPhone 1, it does what it says on the tin. Its stuck on a very old version of iOS, but I think its fine for a phone.
My final choice is the Nexus 4. Its the best built of the phones. It has the best range of apps. Using Android feels like a real chore to me.
> I've replaced that with a firefox phone after it died
Which is far worse if you buy a ZTE open. I had a ZTE blade , no update to ICS , and the display lasted 2 month. You definetly get what you pay for but ZTE phones are crap.
Otoh the g300 was a choice between an ancient version of android or a modern one that was very sluggish.
The g300 completely died in the end, along the way it killed an sd card before completely giving up.
Im not buying huawei again.. The zte im typing this on was a third of the price and although frustrating at times, its to be expected as its quite early days.
I am a huge fan of what Mozilla is doing with FFOS. I bought a ZTE for testing and because I really believe that HTML/CSS/JS is a great choice for a phone platform.
It's a great little device. It's incredible what $80 can buy you. Having said this I don't think I would recommend it as an everyday device. The hardware is slightly underpowered and the screen resolution is too low for my taste. I think you could get a much better browsing experience by spending $50-$100 more on a different device.
I can't wait until a FFOS device in the $200-$300 range comes out. It will be amazing.
The ZTE Open is actually just a cheap Android device. Firefox OS runs on top of Android. If you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty, the current build scripts appear to support a number of old nexus devices (galaxy-nexus, nexus-4, nexus-s, nexus-s-4g, and the galaxy-s2 among others). I have not personally installed a build I've compiled on anything other than a ZTE Open, but from what I read it's too difficult - maybe a weekend's worth of work.
Firefox OS does not run on top of Android. The Android Linux kernel is used but that is it. All the Java/Dalvik code was removed well before the initial release.
I may be splitting hairs here, but I'm fairly sure it's a bit more than just the kernel. Fastboot, and ADB function identically. The partition/imaging layout is identical, so much so that I was easily able to run CWM Recovery on my ZTE Open. On top of that the build processes are very similiar and a large number of repos that appear to be forks of AOSP are included. Perhaps there's another name for this shared part, but I just figured all a good part of the native base was borrowed from Android.
If I made it sound like Firefox OS was just a fancy application launcher, that was not my intent.
