Mozilla was at CES in Las Vegas in January and had a very prominent presence at MWC. The company hit Barcelona with a giant Firefox booth and all of the Firefox OS phones that have been produced so far. Also on show was the new ZTE Open C, a follow on to last year's ZTE Open. Unfortunately, at the time, the device wasn't yet available, and Mozilla couldn't tell us when North Americans would be able to purchase the Firefox OS smartphone for themselves. That changed this week when ZTE made its Firefox OS phone available to folks in the U.S., UK, and other territories via eBay.

Under the hood, the ZTE Open C boasts a 4-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen display and packs a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU. It also has 512 MB of RAM, a 3-megapixel camera, 4 GB of on board storage, and (of course) Mozilla's own Firefox OS. Firefox OS is built on a Linux kernel and utilizes B2G (Boot to Gecko), meaning apps developed on the phone can be entirely built on HTML5, JavaScript and any other open source web application APIs. Phones running Firefox OS also ship with Firefox Marketplace, Mozilla's own app market, as well as built-in social features via Facebook and Twitter, and HERE Maps complete with offline capabilities and smart walking, driving and public transit directions.

The ZTE Open C actually ships with Firefox OS 1.3, which was just announced yesterday and includes several new features. They include dual-SIM dual-standby support for continuous autofocus and flash, access to music controls from the notification tray, support for transferring multiple Bluetooth files simultaneously, and various performance enhancements (such as better scrolling and faster app startups). For developers, Firefox OS 1.3 brings NFC enablers, support for WebGL, asm.js and WebAudio, and several new WebAPIs via Gecko 28.

The ZTE Open went on sale last year also through eBay (as well as through certain carriers in Europe). This model is a little bit more expensive at $100 but, as you can probably tell by the specs, this is not a high-end phone. ZTE is hoping to provide cost conscious consumers more options when shopping for their first smartphone.

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