Unlocked Firefox OS ZTE Open Is Now Available On eBay For For $80

SmartAboutThings writes "We've been hearing quite a lot lately about the Firefox OS, but there are actually only a few Firefox OS phones launched on the market. ZTE Open is one of them and is actually the first Firefox OS phone for consumers. Even if Firefox OS has support from carriers all over the world, it's pretty hard to sell devices in more locations across the world. To remedy that, ZTE is going to sell the Firefox OS Open phone on eBay for eighty dollars, which is actually ten dollars less than the launch price. A real great thing is that the handset will be off-contract and unlocked which means you will be able to use it on all mobile networks. ZTE didn't mention when exactly the device will go on sale on eBay, the company just mentioning 'soon.'"

Radio switch?

[Hatta]

Is there a hardware radio switch for those of us who don't want to be tracked by the government all the time? Failing a hardware switch, a software one could be acceptable since I can compile the OS myself.

At that price, running an open source OS, this might be my first cell phone.

Re:I'll hold out

[larwe]

Well, it's going to be even better than that - it's going to be "Chinese intelligence community ready", or so the US Government believes - Chinese telecoms vendors have very tough going in the US market. Re gmuslera's comment below, there's a lot more software in the phone than just the OS and apps. It seems very unlikely that the whole software stack, particularly the code running in the baseband processor, will be open source (too much proprietary magic in it), and exploits could easily be hidden in that side of the phone - or even in hardware, if it comes to that. After quickly looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS [wikipedia.org] I see that there is no mention made of the coprocessors; they're just talking about the OS and application environment as being open-source. Additionally, if the NSA wants your data - scratch that, WHEN the NSA wants your data, which is all the time, they simply tap it at the source. If you're using someone's network, you're at the mercy of that someone.