ZTE announces new quad-core ICS-powered Era

The Era will have a robust QHD (960 x 540) 4.3 inch screen and 8GB of internal memory, all running on a Tegra 3 chipset. It will also feature HD Voice wideband audio as well as Dolby sound.

The press release also lists some huge goals by ZTE, including becoming a top three handset manufacturer by 2015. This comes after controlling 3.2% of the market share last year, and while that may not sound like much, was enough for them to take fifth place. It certainly doesn't hurt to aim high, and the Era's sweet-sounding specs might help them achieve that.
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Mozilla partners with Telefonica on a Boot to Gecko running phone

As promised, Mozilla revealed one of its partners for the Boot to Gecko project for Open Web Devices.

The browser vendor only started work on their Boot to Gecko OS for phones less than a year ago and has already found a friendly hand to keep the project on schedule to launch in 2012. The partner in question is Telefonica and, by the looks of it, is a perfect match for Mozilla’s web standards based OS.
Both companies are working to create the first batch of Open Web Devices, which will be running the Boot to Gecko OS – using an HTML5+JavaScript layer on top of a Linux kernel. As a result, web interfaces will not only be richer, but they’ll be extremely customizable.
For now, Telefonica and Mozilla are working on a prototype based on an undisclosed Qualcomm chipset, but progress is quick and the Open Web Device architecture will soon be in order for submission to the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium).
Mozilla say we should expect a fully functional device this summer, or the fall, at the latest.

ZTE shoots four Android tablets into the MWC orbit, meet the V9S, V96, PF 100 and T98

ZTE didn’t come all the way from China to Barcelona to just announce smartphones. No, the Chinese are stepping up the slate market as well with their four latest Android tablets.

Image courtesy of IntoMobile
The line-up of new ZTE tablets consists of the PF 100, T98, V96 and V9S. The first two sport quad-core Tegra 3 processors and the other two make do with dual-core chips. Let’s start with the first duo.

PF 100 and T98

The PF 100 and T98 are both running on the Tegra 3 platform clocked at 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM and Icera 450 modem supporting HSPA+. Storage for both is 16GB, with no microSD card support, sadly.
At the back, both the PF 100 and T98 have 5MP cameras with autofocus and 720p HD video recording. Above the screen resides a 2MP fixed focus camera for video chatting.
Time for the differences. The main one is the screen size, as you may have guessed. ZTE PF 100 is a 10.1-incher with WXGA resolution, while the T98 is pushing the same resolution on a 7″ diagonal. And to wrap those two up, their radios differ as well. The 10.1″ PF 100 rocks quad-band GSM, and tri-band UMTS networks, while the T98 supports only dual-band GSM and TD-SCDMA networks.
Both the PF 100 and T98 run Ice Cream Sandwich.

ZTE V96 and V9S

Both the ZTE V96 and V9S are 10.1-inchers and get their oomph from dual-core Snapdragon processors.
The V96 runs on Qualcomm’s MSM8960 platform with dual-core CPU clocked at 1.7GHz and the V9S features the slower Qualcomm MSM8260 with its two cores clocked at 1.2GHz. Both have 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory. MicroSD card slots are missing here as well.
Like the other two, the V96 and V9S sport 5MP autofocus cameras at the back and 2MP fixed focus at the front. The V96 is the lucky one to run Android 4.0 ICS, while the V9S has to live with the older Honeycomb 3.2.
Pricing and release dates are not available at this time.