ZTE to bring a Firefox OS smartphone to Europe this year

 

ZTE and Mozilla are on track to reveal a collaboration effort that would be debuting in Brazil and later come to Europe. The two companies are working to bring the first Firefox OS-powered smartphone and are in talks with an unknown European carrier.

The information comes directly from Cheng Lixin, Chief Executive Officer of ZTE USA. He also shared that ZTE could unveil a Firefox OS smartphone in the US, depending on the demand and interest. ?If that is ready and if consumer studies support that data, then we may launch one in U.S. also this year.?, he said.

Jay Sullivan, Vice President of products at Mozilla, shared that the software company is working with China-based manufacturer TCL (which owns the Alcatel One Touch brand), ZTE and Qualcomm on making devices with Firefox OS. Chairman of TCL, Tomson Li Dongsheng confirmed that the company is in business with Mozilla. These reports align with what we previously heard.

Firefox OS will first launch entry-level smartphones with the intent on tackling the dominance of Android in that market. We've already seen promising early shots of the OS and its app Marketplace. We even managed to do a hands-on, complete with video back at MWC 2012, but we are still curious to see how the actual Firefox OS smartphones turn out.

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Sony Xperia Z might arrive in Europe on February 18

Sony Xperia Z is the highlight of this year's CES, but it was only expected to hit the shelves in March. Various online retailers already listed the phone for the beginning of March and on about ?530 (?650) price.

According to an authorized Sony retailer for Poland we might not have to wait all that long. The website of the store lists the smartphone with a February 18 release. The price however stands at a rather steep ?680.

This is not an official Sony store, but is an officially authorized retailer, so there is some credibility to the announced date. Of course there is a note that the date is subject to change, but here's hoping this is just a standard disclaimer.

A hat tip for Tom, who sent this in!

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HTC rolls out HTC One S Android 4.1 update in Europe, begins beta testing in U.S.

On Christmas Eve, HTC released the Android 4.1 update for the HTC One S across Europe. From what we can gather, the new update is available for most unlocked HTC phones. If you own a carrier branded HTC One S, you’re out of luck – for now. If you have not yet received the update, you can try to manually ping HTC’s update servers by going to Settings > About > Software updates >Check now. The Android 4.1.1 update with HTC Sense 4+ includes Google Now, Project Butter, offline speech-to-text, advanced notifications, a handful of UI tweaks, an updated camera app with Sight Seeing mode (allows you to launch the camera app by pressing the power button) and a new gallery app which sorts images by events and time while plotting them all out on a map.

We are excited to see the update roll out across Europe, but we’re sure most of you will more interested in hearing that HTC has begun beta testing the Android 4.1 update for T-Mobile HTC One S here in the U.S. This phase of beta testing is rolling out to a select number of consumers which means we should see an official Android 4.1 release for the T-Mobile HTC One S in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

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Sony Xperia P, U and sola availability extends to Europe, US

The availability of three of Sony's latest Xperia phones has widened to include Europe, it is getting a foothold in the States too and various other countries as well. The Sony Xperia U and P have been available in Hong Kong and Taiwan for a while now, but they've finally traveled west.

Here's a list of e-tailers that offer the Xperia U, Xperia P and Xperia sola that we've found so far. The list isn't complete, so drop us a line in the comments if you find more.

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