Firefox OS phone launches Tuesday in Spain at $3 a month
Spain-based carrier Telefonica will release on Tuesday the very first Firefox OS phone -- the inexpensive ZTE Open. The launch is a significant milestone in Mozilla's attempt to crack the Apple and Google mobile strongholds.

by Stephen Shankland July 1, 2013 3:01 AM PDT

It's not every day that a new mobile operating system arrives, but Tuesday will be one of them as Telefonica begins selling the inexpensive ZTE Open with Mozilla's Firefox OS in Spain.
The move marks the commercial beginning of an effort by phone makers and network operators to use Mozilla's open-source, browser-based operating system to reclaim power in the mobile market lost to Apple and Google.
The phone itself costs 69 euros ($90), including 30 euros ($39) of pay-as-you-go credit -- or for those who sign up for a two-year contract, for 2.38 euros ($3.10) per month. That's a lot cheaper than most of the new Android and iOS smartphones on the market today that consumers have flocked to and that Firefox OS is competing with.
The ZTE Open won't impress smartphone power users who want more than its 3.5-inch 480x320-pixel touchscreen, 3.2MP camera, 256MB RAM, and 512MB flash memory that's boosted with an included 4GB microSD card. But it's not designed to win them over; it's more for new and cost-conscious smartphone buyers, Yotam Benami, Telefonica's digital director of open Web devices, said in an interview.

While I'm still a Firefox browser fan, I can't see the point of the OS when there's Android.

I welcome it. I like iOS, to a degree, it's very slick but too restrictive - Android OS is cumbersome and generally clumsy, in my experience - The Windows OS has no place on a phone, IMO. My only experience of it is on a couple of different Lumia phones - I don't like it.

There's room for a happy medium, and Firefox might just hit that sweet spot - according to the rumours.

It's aimed at emerging markets, to run on hardware cheap enough that someone earning ten dollars a week can afford.

It's not for you, Dave.

I did say that was the aim. But those needing a cheap phone usually won't have the money for a data contract either... I'll be interested to see what the 3 quid gets them.