ZTE will sell its Firefox phone on eBay for $80

ZTE Open comes to the US through unconventional channels.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

kosso[/url]":22a5oj2y]The reason I ask is that obviously Firefox/Mozilla have never had the H.264 license thereby forcing FF users to use Ogg Theora (or.. urgh.. Flash fallback). If they want to compete at all on mobile, they need to have H.264 support, I think. If that happens for mobile, I'm hoping it might cover the desktop browser too, meaning that multimedia processing systems (which I build) don't have to export OGV files too. At last.

If memory serves, FF was leaning in the direction of deferring to platform capabilities to dodge the issue of H.264 licensing (Since, even if they had the cash to buy enough licenses for the binaries they distribute, they'd be passing a patent-encumbrance on to any downstream users of the code, which they Do Not Want to do).

If they do that, which seems likely, sooner or later, on the desktop, it seems even more likely on the mobile side (where, even if you are legally in the clear, your weedy little SoC may not even be capable of doing decode in software; but probably has a hardware decode, sometimes even encode, engine that can handle video on a trickle of power). If so, ZTE just has to pay Qualcomm the extra nickel or whatever to get the chip with H.264 support enabled, and everything will Just Work.