from the an-interesting-idea-but-will-it-get-traction dept.
Tom's Hardware is reporting on an IndieGoGo campaign to fund a dockable "smartphone PC". Symetium is pitching a customized UI Android 6.0 smartphone with a Snapdragon 820 SoC, 6 GB of RAM, and from 64 to 256 GB of flash storage along with an SD card slot. The Symetium IndieGoGo claims that the device "features an operating system designed to work seamlessly as a desktop OS and a mobile one". When docked with an external display (wirelessly or by USB), the phone can act as a keyboard and mouse.
If any of this sounds familiar, you may be remembering the Ubuntu Edge, a similar concept phone from Canonical that also used an IndieGoGo fixed funding campaign. Canonical sought $32 million for the Ubuntu Edge but only raised $12,809,906. Symetium is looking for just $1.25 million. Prices range from $499 to $999 and it is expected to ship by July 2016.
Related Stories
Samsung has announced the mass production of 12 Gb (1.5 GB) LPDDR4 DRAM chips on a 20nm process. The state-of-the-art was previously 8 Gb. The new DRAM chips could enable the production of smartphones with 6 gigabytes of RAM:
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it's only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
There are several phones on the market with 4 GB of RAM, such as the Oppo Find 9, Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, ASUS ZenFone 2, Sony Xperia Z4, Lenovo K80, Huawei Ascend D8, and soon, Micromax's YU5050. These manufacturers could use 12 Gb chips to create phones with 6 GB of faster RAM without using additional chips.
New laptops are drawing upon features/attributes associated with smartphones, such as LTE connectivity, ARM processors, (relatively) high battery life, and walled gardens:
This year's crop of CES laptops -- which we'll define broadly to include Windows-based two-in-one hybrids and slates -- even show signs of a sudden evolutionary leap. The long-predicted PC-phone convergence is happening, but rather than phones becoming more like computers, computers are becoming more like phones.
The most obvious way this is happening is the new breed of laptops that ditch the traditional Intel (and sometimes AMD) processors for new Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm. So far, we've seen three of these Snapdragon systems announced: the HP Envy x2, the Asus NoveGo and the Lenovo Miix 630.
Laptops with lower-end processors have been tried before, with limited success. Why is now potentially the right time? Because these systems aren't being pitched as bargain basement throwaways -- and in fact, they'll cost $600 and up, the same as many mainstream laptops in the US. Instead, they promise some very high-end features, including always-on LTE connectivity (like a phone) and 20-plus hours of battery life with weeks of standby time, which also sounds more like a phone than a PC. The tradeoff is that these Snapdragon laptops run Windows 10 S, a limited version of Windows 10, which only allows apps from the official Microsoft app store. That's also similar to the walled garden of mobile OS apps many phones embrace.
[...] There's another take on phone-laptop convergence happening here at CES. Razer, the PC and accessory maker, always brings one or two inventive prototypes to CES, such as last year's triple-screen Project Valerie laptop. The concept piece for CES 2018 is Project Linda, a 13-inch laptop shell, with a large cutout where the touchpad would normally be. You drop a Razer Phone in that slot, press a button, and the two pieces connect, with the laptop body acting as a high-end dock for the phone. The phone acts as a touchpad and also a second screen, and it works with the growing number of Android apps that have been specially formatted for larger laptop screens or computer monitors.
Related: Symetium Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for a "Smartphone PC"
Maru OS: an Android ROM that Turns into Debian when it Senses Connected PC Peripherals
What Are Must-Have Specs for a Laptop in 2017?
ARM Based Laptop DIY Kit Ready to Hit the Shops
Windows 10 PCs Running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 to Arrive this Year
Microsoft Knows Windows is Obsolete. Here's a Sneak Peek at Its Replacement.
Samsung to Give Linux Desktop Experience to Smartphone Users
Samsung Shows Off Linux Desktops on Galaxy 8 Smartphone
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced
Snapdragon 845 Announced
Qualcomm Joins Others in Confirming its CPUs Suffer From Spectre, and Other Meltdown News
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:06PM
i find this campaign to be a dubious because the video an pictures all appear to be computer rendering with no sign of an actually prototype anywhere. i'm not doubting their intent, just their progress.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:17PM
He has it set to Fixed Funding, which means they don't get a dime if they don't hit their target. Usually anything on Indigogo with "Flexible" is a scam or at least something people are not actually serious about making a real product and plan to shovel crap and run with the money.
Still, no prototype, really cheezy and cheap looking 3d renderings that a high school kid could come up with, and no actual company backing it, just some random guy named Jonathan Gustafsson. I couldn't even find any articles about him on a quick google search. Website contains no pictures of the people or mentions of anyone else being involved. And he wants 1.25 million dollars? Smells very scammy to me.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:19PM
Before someone says "Well of course they don't have prototypes, they cant afford to build them yet!" No, that isn't how the real world works. You can't even come close to judging the scope and price for a project this big unless you have at least done some testing and prototyping first.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:16AM
Indiegogo when it comes to hardware should be called "scammer's corner" as frankly most of it is just that. Go to YouTube and look up Pat the NES Punk talk on that new "retro console" that is supposed to use Atari Jaguar cases for just one example. He points out they literally have nothing but the molds and are claiming its gonna cost over $300K for a prototype when the guy they had originally hired to design it (who quit because he smelt the bullshit) had fully built 5 of the FPGA boards for the thing with less than $2k out of his own pocket. With Kickstarter they HAVE TO HAVE a working prototype to get on there, with Indiegogo they don't....sorry, that right there is frankly a deal breaker.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Wednesday September 30 2015, @09:10PM
...or it's not really a PC. Sure, it can compute like a PC and act like a PC, but it's just an overpriced miniature appliance until I can install an operating system that doesn't limit its users.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:27PM
Seconded. My next phone will probably be a dumbphone, and I'd love something like this to act as a PDA/laptop/music player/etc.
My showstoppers are:
I'm not sure I care to trawl through the xdadevelopers board and watch pointlessly long youtube videos yet again just to gain access to hardware I've bought, and hacks can get patched. If it uses a software-defined radio, I might be open to a boot-time setting that would disable the cellular bits, but depending on how tightly my tinfoil is on by the time this comes out, I'd still wonder about some special knock the modem could receive that would cause the device to ignore that setting and proceed to dump a RAM image straight to the NSA.
(Score: 2) by jmoschner on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:34AM
Well this seems like they are just trying to make a suped up version of the Asus Padfone. I have one of the mini's and it is an okay phone/tablet. Not really powerful, but at 200 bucks I didn't expect it to be.
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Wednesday September 30 2015, @09:39PM
How about a real, nice quality keyboard on my next smartphone? My G1 was still the best device I've ever had, every subsequent Android handset since has been a step backwards. Seriously, nothing would make me happier than the G1 form factor updated with a modern processor.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:04PM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:54PM
To my uneducated and totally clueless brain I pronounced their name in my head as "sometime". Maybe "Some" day but not "To" day :)
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday October 01 2015, @05:28AM
You don't develop a flagship handset from concept to certification and all the way into production for a million. Not even a normal one running stock software and off the shelf components. This one pushes several specs beyond what is currently shipping on any handset and envisions major software development. Nope.
They should grab some flagship phones with USB-C and get their software sorted out and demo ready. Then go for getting a Chinese handset maker to jack the ram and flash on one of their units instead of trying to roll some nerd's wet dream from scratch. Sell those and demonstrate the concept actually works and people will really buy into it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:32PM
Considering how many cheap Apple copycats in China have graduated into the big leagues of the smartphone market (Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO), and the very small players that have successfully used crowdfunding, pre-order, or invite models (OnePlus, Fairphone, Ubik [kickstarter.com], etc.), I found the Symetium pitch plausible enough to post.
The materials and expertise needed to build a smartphone are cheap and abundant. A bigger question is whether it is profitable to do so. Apple has an oversized share of smartphone industry profits compared to its market share. Sony is losing big money [theregister.co.uk]. A smaller company can conceivably avoid some of the problems faced by Sony, HTC, and LG, all of which are competing and making Android phones.
The specs aren't impossible. It looks like Xiaomi and Samsung will be launching Snapdragon 820 phones this year (around December-January). And this company is launching a phone with Snapdragon 820 and 6 GB of RAM [softpedia.com]. That's made possible by putting together 4 of Samsung's new 1.5 GB LPDDR4 modules, the story for which is linked in the summary. 64 GB is no longer a super premium NAND option, and the 128 GB and 256 GB models are priced accordingly.
There are 38 days left in the campaign, so maybe check it out again in early November.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:35PM
Then again here's someone who agrees with you:
http://bgr.com/2015/09/29/symetium-android-phone-indiegogo-project/ [bgr.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]