Is it a gimic or a great idea. A phone with inbuild crypto wallet and decentralized app store in addition to all of the usual features you can get.
I'm not even sure myself but i did make a small profit on Solana during the great memecoin rush of 2024. I pre-ordered the phone as my own one was crap and it was a mid price phone with a crypto wallet. I couldn't resist.
First impressions.
I have to say that I'm actually quite impressed with the phone. The quality of the build is very good. The speed is way ahead of my last phone. It has all of the usual android features so much that it was definitely copied directly from another model. It is so similar in look and feel that there is no friction in changing phone and the apps all transferred straight over.
The negatives would be an average enough camera.
It needs a back button on the bottom of the face instead of having to reach up for the top corner of each web page.
It has a solana Dapp store but the Dapps are crap. Nothing worth downloading.
What would be brilliant would be a collaboration with Hive dapps creating a solana login to our blockchain and have a suite of really cool apps preloaded on the phones.
Imagine getting your phone and seeing actifit, inleo, splinterlands, ecency, leodex, snappie, liketu and all the others. Quality apps that work and would be useful for people. That would be a brilliant collaboration. One for VSC to work on and get in line for the next edition.... If only.
There were 150,000 units sold just from the presale which is a very good number for any crypto project in terms of real users.
The first version was released two years ago and received a number of airdrops worth thousands at the peak of the meme cycle so hopefully we see something similar again this time and the phone can pay for itself.
Overall I'm a fan but they have a long way to go in the next few years to rival the top phones and a long way to go in terms of apps on solana.