Solana presented its smartphone

 After a period of failures due to network instability and a significant drop in capitalization, the project tried to take Steve Jobs’ revolutionary path by presenting a WEB3 smartphone called Saga at the New York Summit. No one knows yet about the real competencies of Pavel Yakovenko’s team beyond blockchain and marketing. Producing a physical gadget (especially amid the bear market) is definitely a challenge. And it is reassuring that the time-tested Android has become the basis for the device.

Yet, it’s easy to imagine that the product will prove successful: the community seems pretty passionate and won’t make a full-fledged comparative analysis of smartphone features. Therefore, the first batch will probably be sold out.

The announced “chips” look interesting. The central concept is the “emphasis on the crypto community”, which gets an impressive mobile multitool with functionality that may not always be entrusted to a regular phone.

Saga will feature optional fingerprint login, cross-platform approval, AES encryption, and protection against hacking or transactional data interception. Seed Vault stores private keys separately from the app layer but can interact with apps running on the device or mobile browser.

Developers of apps on the Solana platform are promised a unified SDK to create and extend the functionality of a dApp (like any other Android app). Secure wallet signing will also be integrated.

The dApp store will help promote new dApps, and provide support for native and web extensions that will be developed and deployed via SMS (Solana Mobile Stack).

The ability to pay for purchases or to invoice with a simple tap or QR scan. And merchants will be able to embed the Solana Pay button into their online store to trade with payments in cryptocurrency.

The Saga is provided with a 6.67-inch OLED display, 12GB of RAM, a 512GB hard drive, and the latest flagship Snapdragon mobile platform.

The smartphone will cost $1,000. Pre-orders are already open, with a required deposit of 100 USDC, which is considered during the surcharge. There is also a territorial restriction: the phone can only be ordered by Americans, Canadians, citizens of Great Britain, and the European Union.

It was not without skepticism: users recalled that a similar initiative was offered by Facebook a few years ago. And, despite access to almost unlimited funding, Zuckerberg did not succeed.