Announced in June 2022, the world’s first “crypto smartphone”, Saga, is set to launch as early as the first quarter of 2023, with an expected price of $1,000. Founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko claimed that Saga will be a “new standard for the Web3 experience on mobile”. With this launch, the company shows its ambition to conquer the mainstream and make a breakpoint in the market.
So far, there have been some remarkable features unveiled:
Saga’s features
At 6.67 inches, Saga’s screen is almost as big as Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro Max, under the hood is 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage.
With the Seed Vault, which is built into the phone, you can keep private keys and seed phrases safe. While speaking during the conference at Breakpoint 2022, Solana noted that the mobile phone would be able to securely store the private keys of crypto wallets. Solana will be backed by a Qualcomm chipset sporting an Arm-based SoC to support higher productivity.
Cointelegraph posted a demo of the incoming phone on Twitter:
Basically, this is an Android but much faster. The main difference to the iPhone and Android is the fingerprint sensor on the back. It connects to your webkey. Using other smartphones, you have to go through ten steps to make a transaction, here the fingerprint is enough.
In addition, Solana also mentioned at the Breakpoint 2022 its Solana decentralized application (dApp) store. On the store, you can find “games, DeFi apps, actually everything”. You also no longer have to follow the rules of Google and Apple, there would be no revenues, fees, or charges from Solana’s DApp store. Interested participants can begin to turn in their submissions from January next year.
The smartphone is still in the early development phase, but there have been many distinguished apps in development, and some of them are already available to use. Solana has also collaborated and is supported by top-notch firms to expand its Web 3 app ecosystem and services. These developments promise to bring the best Web3 experience to users. Recently, Nova Labs, the company behind Helium Network, announced it will offer SIM cards and a free trial to Saga smartphone users.
Conclusion
Till the official release, Solana will surely reveal more new features for its Saga smartphone. Whether this product can bring Web3 to a new level as promised, let’s wait and see.