"One of the promised advantages of Firefox OS compared to the competition is that a device owner will not have to violate terms of warranty, usage or service (by "rooting" the device) in order to install versions of the operating system not supported by the manufacturer."

That's assuming that said versions will function. The ZTE Open has only 256 MB of RAM; sooner or later Firefox OS is going to require more. The version I have now in my ZTE Open is flaky. Twitter crashes fairly often, sometimes the machine pauses for inordinate lengths of time and there's some bizarre malfunction in the 'Call' app when I call a service that requires lengthy numeric prompt responses. In summary, it's alpha quality now.

There's also the issue of carrier coverage. There's no 'list of approved carriers'; I went to a third-party reseller in Beaverton and got on T-Mobile. T-Mobile's coverage is spotty. Verizon is out because they're CDMA. Who else is there? Will AT&T put a SIM card in it and sell me a data plan?

"Mozilla gets a direct channel to users who represent a whole new crop of potential beta testers, app developers and evangelists."

As I've noted, I got the device mostly to use to develop apps. So yes, I'm a potential app developer. But it's not a beta quality system at this point, and I could hardly be an evangelist for it given the current state of things.

There are approximately 1600 units in the wild in the USA by my calculation. The first eBay lot of 1000 sold out, and the current lot still had 400 or so available the last time I looked. So yes, we're pioneers and testers, but we're not likely to be evangelists until the quality moves beyond its current hobbyist state. We'll get laughed out of existence.

I'm going to develop for Firefox OS one way or another. I've got a Geeksphone Peak+ on order; it has a gig of RAM and a dual-core processor so I think it's not going to be as big a hassle as the Open. I'm going down the 'mobile first' path and the 'responsive design' path and the HTML5/CSS3 path.

Let's make lemonade!

No, it is not yet a mature platform.

Personally speaking, I would rather have the alpha version sooner than the release version later. I have waited 10 long years (a toast to Maemo!) for a phone running transparently developed software with publicly reviewable source code. I can wait a few more months for the finished product. In the meantime, I have a phone that is perfectly capable of calling, texting, surfing and hotspotting (with more than 5 clients); cost $80 unsubsidized; gives me 3.5G speed on prepaid data plans at a rate of $10/GB ; allows me to troubleshoot my own problems; offers a support community with direct access to manufacturer management.

I dumped my research on compatible US carriers in the documentation page, pending editorial review.

"Hopefully everyone with an early model will get the message and perform the update so we can all get back on the same, single, original, fastboot-enabled page."

Hopefully ZTE and/or Mozilla will spread the message to consumers with the affected devices.

I have played for a few days with flashing and re flashing.. bricking and un'bricking the phone.. it is now not a mystery to me - if you need some advice - ping me. Pretty easy device to play with - nothing major - just a little patience if there is an issue. I have built a 1.2 version from the GitHub - which works except the SIM isn't seen. The phone needs to be rooted to fix - which is easy with adb even on Windows - you just need to setup Android's SDK and you can do what ever with the phone.

Check out http://pof.eslack.org/2013/07/05/zte-open-firefoxos-phone-root-and-first-impressions/ for rooting help - you basiclly need to get "su" installed so you can su to root to write to the system files.

I will work up a blog page with more details - hope this helps.

KeithUT, ZTE has released a fix that is supposed to unlock the bootloader, so jumping through hoops in order to update the software should no longer be necessary.

Nice! I looked around I haven't seen it. You have a link? Or did I just majorly miss something in this thread?

EDIT: I know there is suppose to be one in the update channel for the phone - the loader did not work for me. So I used adb to do the flashing. I was also tossing out some help for those that feel they have "bricked" their phone.

The solution is in one of the many support threads about ZTE Open. I'll see if I can find it.

Like I said before, ZTE should notify users of the affected device that there is a fix available.

Very good. Thank you!

here you go https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/971252?page=2#answer-484863

That took far to long for my liking; "support" is saturated with ZTE related issues.

KeithUT: What are some of the improvements you have noticed with Firefox OS 1.2?

znmeb: What kind of apps are you working on? I know there are lots of resources on MDN for getting started with app development. Do you have any unique tips based on your experience?

I just flashed my ZTE Open and it worked perfectly. It only took about 15 seconds to do the update, not one or two minutes as described in the instructions. It upgraded to V1.0.0B02 as expected.

The only weirdness was the I ended up with an extra version of the Notes app. Perhaps it wasn't able to update without losing the existing notes. I uninstalled the old version of Notes since there wasn't anything important there. Then I got a notification for an update of Notes. The update wouldn't load so I cancelled and rebooted, as recommended in the help. It took a few tries but it finally worked, and everything seems fine now.

EDIT: I now realize that there are actually two apps called Notes, one official and one unofficial. I had deleted the official one and it reinstalled itself automatically after I did the update. Mystery solved!

Has anyone that has flashed the ZTE Open confirmed that the device can now use fastboot?

I've performed the 'update', but when I connect my device to my laptop and use the fastboot application, it just outputs "< waiting for device >"

Running `adb reboot recovery` however, will reboot the device, so I know that device is being detected by the Host OS

"znmeb: What kind of apps are you working on? I know there are lots of resources on MDN for getting started with app development. Do you have any unique tips based on your experience?"

I'm just slogging through the MDN tutorials at the moment, including Quick Guide For Firefox OS App Development https://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment. Eventually I'm planning on data journalism apps once I get the tooling complete.

'Hi everyone!'

I'm from Spain (sorry for my English), and I bought yesterday a ZTE Open. There is a list of the stuff I did:

1.- I turn on the phone. After, I reboot it and discover my new recovery. It scared me, so,

2.- I flashed CWM to it using adb.

3.- I come back to the system, and it need to be updated. I agree all. 'Phone rebooted after download' things.

4.- The "Obligatory System Update" failed. I try again. Once again. Nothing.

5.- I downloaded from here (http://firefox.ztems.com/) OPEN rom to have a clean ROM (using CWM). It worked perfectly, but..

6.- It need to update (9 MBs) and It rebooted. Installation finished without errors and since then I have never seen the home screen again.

7.-I try to install these roms: Rom1, Rom2, Rom3, all unsucessfully, with E:failed to verify whole-file signature E:signature verification failed Installation aborted. Yes, my CWM was replaced by this

8.- I have try a lot of other things, like use fastboot (ZTE Handset Diagnostic appear, but Debian 7 fastboot don't recognize it, nor Windows 8, nor WXP on virtualbox), sign by myself the .zip's, and another frustrating and useless things.

Me against the world. Me against Movistar's ZTE "Open". I can't install official unsigned stuff.

Help, please :'(  !

@fiti123

If you have CWM handy you can probably put it back by using fastboot.

If the phone boots but has a white screen you'll either be able to find it with adb devices or fastboot devices. If it's adb devices just run adb reboot bootloader

Once you have adb fastboot able to find the phone you can put a new recovery image on the phone with fastboot flash recovery /path/to/recovery.img

Then you can reboot, then use adb reboot recovery or the key-presses to get you up and running. Then you should be able to install an update file from recovery.

From there I'd suggest using the zte open update file from here: http://firefox.ztems.com/ and see how that goes.