Solana Saga Crypto Phone Review

Explore the Solana Saga crypto phone in this in-depth review. Discover its unique crypto features, premium materials, and whether it’s worth considering in a market flooded with Android smartphones. Is this Solana Saga Crypto Phone ahead of its time or a niche device with limited appeal?

Introduction

All right, so this is a Solana Saga Crypto Phone. And I know what you’re thinking,

“What the hell is a Solana Saga Crypto Phone, and why would anyone want that?”

And that’s exactly what I was thinking when this first crossed my radar. So this is an upper, mid-range Android phone, with crazy material choices, from a brand you’ve never heard of, with some specific crypto features built in, that launched at a $1000.

Now, I know I have been notably skeptical on crypto and Web3 and blockchain and the Metaverse and all that sort of stuff over the past couple years, so you may consider me biased, but I still think if you took the crypto out of this phone, it would at least have potential. I’m serious. Let me explain.

The Origin Story

So the story of this phone actually starts all the way back with the Essential Phone. So I don’t know how many y’all remember the Essential Phone back in 2017, but that was a really interesting and exciting new development in the smartphone world. We don’t get that many genuinely promising, new phone companies coming along and doing good things, but that’s exactly what this Andy Rubin startup was promising when they came out with their first phone. It was just this refreshing sort of minimal design. There were no protruding camera bumps, no big logos or branding. They were one of the first to do this camera notch here, at the top of the screen, with the thin bezels, and they were one of the only ones using these super premium materials, the titanium rails and polished ceramic on the back, and then it just had some pins on the back with some magnets for attaching some modular accessories, just some genuinely interesting, really cool ideas on top of some super clean software.

Now, unfortunately, this experiment didn’t really catch on. You know, this unfortunate combination of high price, mediocre cameras, not that strong of a feature set for regular people to care, launching as a Sprint exclusive, all of this led to extremely low sales. And then the company would go on to dynamite itself after a bunch of info about Andy Rubin comes out. And so we would not get to see a second try, an Essential Phone 2.

OSOM OV1 and Its Challenges

Now, it sucks to see a promising company with a ton of talent just disappear like that, but something that happens a lot, a lot of times when these businesses dissolve, is the teams that worked on stuff sometimes will pop up somewhere else, and work on something else. And so sure enough, in 2020, a bunch of the engineers from the original Essential team got back together to form a new company, called OSOM, and they would announce their first project, the OSOM OV1, basically the spiritual successor to the Essential Phone, and you can see a lot of similarities and continuity in this announcement. They talked about these crazy materials again, this titanium and polished ceramic, and the rectangular design, but they also, then tried to correct a bunch of the things that doomed the original Essential Phone. It is noticeably bigger, and with a bigger screen, bigger battery, etc. But shocker, they didn’t really get enough interest in this brand new startup phone to be able to bring this whole idea back to life. It’s the classic enthusiast phone problem where like it’s a cool idea, and some people really, really want it, but there’s not enough hype to be able to make the whole thing happen.

Rebranding the OSOM OV1 as the Solana Saga Crypto Phone

That is until Solana came along. So Solana is a Web 3 company looking for new projects and OSOM is this hardware team looking for some backing to make this phone happen. So Solana would bring the cash and bring their backing. OSOM would bring their hardware talent and they’d partnered together to turn the OV1 into this rebranded Solana Saga crypto phone. And it would be a thousand dollars. And that’s this phone right here. So all right, where do we start? There’s basically three things that make this a crypto phone instead of just another regular Android phone.

Hardware Specifications

So the Solana Mobile Stack, the Seed Vault and the Dapp store so okay, outside of those things, this OV1 or the Solana phone is actually a very average Android phone. Like specs wise, it’s a Snapdragon 8+, gen one, so that would be last year’s flagship chip, but then 12 gigs of RAM and half a terabyte of storage, although it’s unclear if it’s fast UFS 3.1, but it’s a nice big 6.67 inch flat 1080p 120 hertz display, at the front, that gets decently bright, but it is not LTPO, it’s just a fixed refresh rate, and then it’s powered by a 4,100 milliamp hour battery with wireless charging.

Not great for the size of this screen, but not tiny. And then it’s IP 68 water and dust resistant with a micro SD card slot for storage expansion. But then a pair of really mediocre cameras on the back. It’s got the same 50 megapixel main camera sensor that’s in the ROG Phone 7 and the Oppo Find X5 pro, but with worse software, and that’s paired with a 12 megapixel ultra-wide camera, both of which can pretty much only produce in perfect lighting, after which things fall apart very quickly with a lack of detail, excessive noise, just no really impressive strengths, just a really very heavily mixed bag here.

Impressive Build and Materials

But there are two things about this phone that actually I’m very impressed by, that I really like.

Number one is the materials again, just this world class build quality, because like I said, it’s basically the same team, the awesome OV1 team, that came from the original Essential Phone. And so they have this affinity for super high quality materials. So we’re talking matte stainless steel frame with colored titanium buttons and a full ceramic back, which yes, picks up fingerprints everywhere, other than the fingerprint reader, but dude, this phone is a tank. This phone is also very heavy. It weighs like 250 grams, which is more than an apple iPhone 14 Pro Max. It’s got these nice squared off sides, that I really like. There’s absolutely no squeaking, creaking, flexing at all. It’s just this hilariously, well-made packaging of these average specs.

But then two, the other thing I really like, aside from the crypto stuff, the software itself, once you get into it, is actually extremely clean, very clean, like stock Android. So it is Android 13, and who knows when it’ll get Android 14 if at all, but you can dig through everything and it is very quick and responsive and clean everywhere. It’s the stock Android quick settings, the stock Android wallpaper and customization screens, all these stock Google apps, the clock, the calendar, Chrome, everything. Now, does any of this justify a $100 price tag? (exhales) Okay, well, let’s see, ot’s got last year’s flagship spec, kind of weak cameras, weak battery, not that amazing of a screen, but it’s stock Android and good build, not really worth a thousand bucks, right?

So that’s why literally less than a year after it came out, the price plummeted from a thousand to $600. So now the real question is would you pay, would anybody pay $600 for a barely above average, well-built, Android phone that happens to have some crypto features built in?

Crypto Features

(sighs) I guess this is the part where I have to go over all of the crypto and web 3 features.

So all right, like I mentioned earlier, there’s three things that make this a Solana Saga Crypto Phone. So the Solana Mobile Stack is an SDK for apps to connect to this Solana blockchain, which I mean, it’s cool that it’s built in, but the obvious downside being this does not work with any other blockchain. So no Bitcoin, no Litecoin, no Ethereum, this is just focused on the Solana blockchain. Then the seed vault is basically dedicated storage of a 24 phrase seed, stored in a secure environment, where the Android OS cannot see them, so that would let you unlock your wallet, and then the last feature is something I’ve been calling a Dapp store, which is literally a second app store on this device that’s specifically for crypto apps, crypto focused stuff. So Phantom Wallet is on here, OKX, a crypto exchange is on here, Brave Browser, things like that. There’s an app called Minty Fresh that lets you turn photos from your camera roll into NFTs in a few seconds and a few clicks, if you’re into that I guess. But those are the only three things that really make this a Solana Saga Crypto Phone, and one of ’em, the Dapp store, is not really even that special because it is coming to other phones and you’ll be able to get it on a non crypto phone. So there’s that too.

Practicality and Niche Appeal

Now, the other stuff, I think you can actually make an argument. is really, really cool to have built into the phone and actually secure like that. And if you are in the Solana ecosystem, this is the only place you can get that stuff. But man, I feel like that’s about the most niche (laughs) feature possible. Like remember we were just talking about the Zenfone 10, how I love that phone, it’s a super great phone. It’s just a shame it won’t sell because not as many people like small phones. Do you think the number of people, who are in the Solana ecosystem and want to buy a phone that has some of those features built in, is greater than or less than the number of people who want a small phone?

Unique Charging Cable

Basically, the number one coolest thing to come outta this project, to me, is exposing me to this thing right here, which is the cable that comes in the box for this phone. This is a braided USBC, a USBC cable, but not just any cable. At the end here is a hard switch that blocks all data and only lets power through, just making it a charging cable, and that’s actually pretty sick, highly effective for preventing something called juice jacking attacks where if you plug into, like a public outlet somewhere, but that outlet is malicious and is gonna try to upload malware to your device or download photos or something, this cable will not let that happen, just blocks all data. So if you’re plugging into an extremely rare, public USBC port, (laughs) this is actually a great tool to have, but it’s also not that special and it’s available on Amazon for like 30 bucks.

Final Verdict

So at this point, I don’t even have to really tell you, but the Solana Saga Crypto Phone is basically a pretty standard Android phone with a couple kind of cool, but extremely niche crypto features for one specific crypto stack, one that happens to also be tanking pretty hard and has been tanking for months. And I also don’t even really have to tell you that there’s basically no reason for 99.99% of people to buy this.

Conclusion

Even if you were to try to buy this phone, just for a nice clean stock Android phone, and just totally ignore all the crypto features, you can get a lot more phone for $600 for the same price you could get a Google Pixel 7 or probably Pixel 8, by the time it comes out. You could get a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S 23. You could get any number of 1+ phones. I just don’t think this is anywhere near the top of the list for 600 bucks. And really that’s the shame of it. Being a brand new phone company is really hard unless your name is Carl Pay, apparently.

So I wish there was a world where the OSOM OV1 could just exist and could thrive, and a small niche community, could love it, but now instead, this becomes the perfect embodiment of crypto in 2023.

At best, ahead of its time, but at worst, completely useless to most everyday people and gives whatever else is going to follow it an even harder uphill battle.

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