ZTE has brought us two new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—the Grand Memo and the Open. During the event, ZTE was confident that their devices will make an impact in the market—so confident that they targeted becoming a top three smartphone maker by 2015, alongside the current big guns in the smartphone industry, Apple and Samsung.
The ZTE Grand Memo lives up to its name—or at least the “grand” part of it. It sports a 5.7-inch screen but is only 0.33 inches thin, with a 720×1280 screen resolution (386 ppi). It comes with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset, a 1.5 GHz Krait 400 CPU and 2 GB of RAM. It has 16 GB of internal memory (expandable via microSD), a 13 megapixel back camera and a 1 megapixel front camera. The back camera will also be capable of recording Full HD (1080p) video. The Grand Memo will also have the Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean) OS, with ZTE’s custom user interface (UI), Mifavour, layered on top of it. The Grand Memo will be powered by a 3200 mAh battery, and will also have LTE support, which makes sense as more and more carriers roll out their LTE networks. The ZTE Grand Memo will be available by the second quarter of 2013, although pricing was not announced at the event.
The new Firefox OS is also going to be part of ZTE’s lineup through the entry-level ZTE Open. The ZTE Open will have a 3.5-inch HVGA touchscreen at a 320×480 resolution (165 ppi), and will be 0.49 inches thin. It will also come with a Qualcomm MSM7225A Snapdragon chipset, along with a 1GHz Cortex A5 CPU and 256 MB of RAM. There will be 512 MB of storage (also expandable via microSD) and a 3.15 megapixel back camera. It will also be powered by a 1200 mAh battery. There will also be Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support
Regarding the Firefox OS and the ZTE Open, Mozilla co-founder and ZTE’s chief technology officer, Brendan Eich, said, “We wanted to make the Web open and available and accessible to everyone. We wanted developers to hack the Web without permission, and give users control over their experience.” Eich also said, “There are several hundred thousand iOS and Android developers, but there are 8 million Web developers.”
The ZTE Open will also be released in the second quarter of 2013, but there is no word on to how much it will cost.