ZTE Open – upgrading to Firefox OS 1.2

[Continued in Success! Firefox OS 1.4 built and running on ZTE Open]

I’ve just bought a ZTE Open phone with the intention of exploring Firefox OS, Mozilla’s new HTML-based, fully open mobile operating system. The idea was that at £54 pounds from ZTE Europe on eBay it is a very low cost entry into building Firefox OS apps or the OS itself. Little did I expect it to be such a pain but the good news  is I finally managed to get it going and thought I should share how.

The phone is OK but you get what you pay for. It reminds me of the very cheap Galaxy Europa I one brought a couple of years back.  With my fat fingers it’s very hard to type on the seemingly inaccurate and very small touch screen. A passive stylus doesn’t work either. However, it works well enough as a basic smartphone.

First the problem; the ZTE Open I received was at OS version 1.0 and I obviously want to hack on the latest (1.3 /1.4) and send updates to the phone. Also, the easiest entry  to developing apps is to use either the Firefox OS Simulator or the Apps Manager connected to a real device running 1.2 or  higher.

You know what it’s like, you hit a problem and Google throws up loads of fixes that have worked for others. The problem is that these solutions are often slightly different being discovered at various times since the problem 1st appeared and many subtle changes have occurred to the various bits of software or hardware, thus breaking the solutions. I got extremely frustrated and was even informed that the phone has been nicknamed the “ZTE Closed” by some folks at Mozilla. Anyway I won’t waste time on all the dead ends I tried but simply present the final solution that worked for me. I will just mention that I had no luck with the MDN page or  Mozilla Hacks article that’s worked for many – “fastboot devices” would just not work. I missed the note in that post to the solution that eventually worked for me (after a few problems). It might be due to my using Windows as host rather than Linux but I found the alternative solution before I tried on Linux.

So the solution:

1. Upgrade to 1.1B02 using the SDCard method provide by ZTE (US & UK)
2. Upgrade to 1.2 using the phone download method provided by ZTE (US & UK)

The 1st step is probably not needed but I performed it as an early step anyway. I modified the second step to also update “system” which is not shown selected in the ZTE instructions.

ZTE Open Firmware site

As is so often the case once I finally solved it I found the perfect source of information. I don’t know who owns the site but zteopenfirmware is a real mine of information on the ZTE Open phones firmware. They even provide advice on using version 1.3 and 1.4 which I intend to build and flash soon as an exercise. While I discovered the same answer, I’d be hard put to provide such clear details on upgrading the ZTE Open. Thus I simply refer you to this excellent resource.

Hopefully this short post will save a few others some pain. Good luck and happy hacking.

PS. if you like such things, here is a draft user manual for the ZTE Open (pdf).