ZTE unveils the Grand Memo phablet and the ZTE Open

ZTE brought two interesting phones to the MWC that are as different as can be. The ZTE Grand Memo is a 5.7” Android super-phone and is the first to use the Snapdragon 800 chipset. The ZTE Open, on the other hand is an entry-level Firefox OS phone.

ZTE Grand Memo

The ZTE Grand Memo earns its name with a big screen – 5.7” in diagonal. Rather disappointingly, the resolution of the screen is just 720p. Not that 258ppi pixel density is all that bad, but we expected more.

Update: there's some conflicting information, but we checked on the unit itself and confirmed that the screen is 720p and not 1080p.

Especially considering the chipset - the ZTE Grand Memo uses the top end Snapdragon chipset available, the Snapdragon 800. The CPU cores are clocked at 1.5GHz and should be faster than the cores in the other Snapdragon chipsets clock for clock and the Adreno 330 GPU should double the performance of the 320.

Update, again: ZTE is now saying the Grand Memo has a Snapdragon 600 chipset, not 800. By the way things are going, this info will probably change again. The one thing ZTE is certain about right now is that it's some sort of Snapdragon chipset.

ZTE Grand Memo

The phablet is only 8.5mm thick, but thanks to the extra height and width, the ZTE engineers managed to cram a 3,200mAh battery inside it.

The camera on the ZTE Grand Memo is a 13MP shooter with 1080p video capture. On the connectivity side, the phone has LTE Cat 3 (100Mbps down, 50Mbps up) and dual-band Wi-Fi with 802.11ac support – the latest Wi-Fi spec available.

ZTE Open

The ZTE Open is on the other end of the spectrum – it has a 3.5” HVGA screen, 3.2MP camera, 1GHz single-core processor and 256MB RAM. It’s powered by Firefox OS, which was officially unveiled yesterday.

ZTE Open

The Open will tackle entry-level Android phones in emerging markets, by promoting an open source OS with easy to make HTML5-based apps.

The phone features Wi-Fi b/g/n connectivity, Bluetooth 2.1 and A-GPS with Nokia HERE maps.