ZTE Open C

Last week the ZTE Open C  (a variant of the ZTE Kis III running Firefox OS instead of Android) was sold for just 29 € by ComeBuy. Given such a low price I just had to order one as a “trow-away” phone for concerts and the likes.

Turns out the device is quite good. Overall build quality is better than the Flame’s and its touch panel does not suck.

Sadly the device ships with Firefox OS 1.3, based on Jelly Bean, so Mozilla’s current B2G-builds do not work here. There are community builds, but they still feel quite unpolished, so I had a look for alternatives. Turns out there is a CM 12.1 (Android 5.1) based ROM available and it works great so far.

Update 2015-05-23: Still no problems and Firefox for Android runs fine on the device, too. As it is much more powerful than the Firefox OS browser, using Android is the better choice for me at the moment.

Android apps

The following is a short list of nice Android apps which help getting away from proprietary services (Google, Dropbox, …)

Out of these, FolderSync is the only app that is not open source, but hopefully Encdroid will support fetching files from ownCloud directly soon.

I am still looking for a solution regarding notes, ideally giving me access to the same set of notes on GNOME, Web and Android.

Messaging remains the biggest problem. Sure there’s XMPP, but nobody seems to use it. Maybe heml.is can replace WhatsApp? For Email, let’s see how Mailpile develops…