ZTE reportedly plans to launch its first Open webOS-based smartphone later this year, along with a new phones running on a new mobile operating system developed by Mozilla.

The information comes from two different reports.

Citing industry sources in Taiwan, Digitimes.com today reported that ZTE will be the first smartphone vendor to adopt Open webOS after Hewlett Packard promised to release webOS under an open source license project. The smartphone is set for release in the fourth quarter of 2012, the report claims. HP has released already a beta version of the WebOS code. The same sources also unveiled ZTE's plans to roll out smartphone models running on Mozilla's mobile OS - Boot To Gecko (B2G).

Reuters confirmed ZTE's cooperation with Mozilla.

"We are trying to increase our efforts in coming up with our own operating system, while introducing products based on Android," said ZTE spokesman David Dai Shu. ZTE will release the operating system with Mozilla over the next few months, and plans to unveil a product for use in mobiles either at the same time or a little later, Dai added.

In July, Mozilla said mobile network operators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Smart, Telecom Italia, Telenor and Etisalat were backing the Firefox platform.

More smartphone vendors may follow the steps of ZTE to develop open-source Linux platforms due to the controversy erupting over Google's attempt to check development of modified Android platforms by banning Acer from launching a smartphone based on Aliyun, developed by China-based Alibaba.

ZTE is also looking into Web-based operating systems, but has no immediate plans to support those developed by Chinese Internet firms such as Baidu and Alibaba.

Currently, he bulk of ZTE's phones run on Android, while its 'Tania' series uses Windows.

Mozilla's B2G aims to be an open rival to Google's Android. It has been designed under the same philisophy Mozilla has folowed for the development of the Firefox browser: Using strictly official standards and give people more control over what their phones do and the applications they run. B2G is aimed to pursue the goal of building a standalone operating system for mobile devices that would run applications primarily on the Web.