SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(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]