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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:06PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:06PM (#243679)

    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

      by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:17PM (#243682)

      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

        by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @08:19PM (#243683)

        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

      by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:16AM (#243765) Journal

      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

    by meisterister (949) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @09:10PM (#243693) Journal

    ...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

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:27PM (#243721) Journal

      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:

      • Can it run GNU/Linux or BSD, and if it does, will I need to do some kind of hack to enable that or will there be a supported way to, say, boot off an SDcard?
      • Can I open the case and physically disconnect or disable the cellular modem?

      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

        by jmoschner (3296) on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:34AM (#243769)

        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

    by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Wednesday September 30 2015, @09:39PM (#243702) Homepage Journal

    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

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:04PM (#243714) Journal

    What if my question isn’t answered here?

    Please contact us at jonathan@symetium.com

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:54PM

    by black6host (3827) on Wednesday September 30 2015, @10:54PM (#243733) Journal

    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

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 01 2015, @05:28AM (#243866)

    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

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:32PM (#244237) Journal

      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.

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:35PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:35PM (#244239) Journal

      Then again here's someone who agrees with you:

      http://bgr.com/2015/09/29/symetium-android-phone-indiegogo-project/ [bgr.com]

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