The Saygus V² smartphone sounds amazing on paper. It has a 5 inch full HD display, 3GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, two micro SD card slots, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, and a 21MP camera.
Saygus started showing off a prototype in January and had hoped to ship the phone in May to customers that placed pre-orders for $599.
But the company has sent a letter to customers letting them know that Saygus had to switch manufacturing partners which has led to a delay. Now the plan is to ship phones this fall… and Saygus hopes to get more backing for the project through a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo.
On the bright side, the company now plans to ship the phone with android 5.1 Lollipop rather than Android 4.4 KitKat, and Saygus has added dual SIM support, allowing you to use the phone on multiple networks.
Saygus is also saying the phone now supports up to 464GB of storage thanks to the dual microSD cards. Previously the company was saying it could handle up to 320GB. I don’t think that’s actually a spec change though: it’s just that larger microSD cards are now available.
On the less bright side, not only will the phone now ship sometime after September at the soonest, but the crowdfunding campaign looks kind of fishy.
Saygus wants to raise $1,000,000 for the project… but as soon as the campaign went live, the project already had more than $800,000 in pledges. How is that possible? It looks like Indiegogo allowed Saygus to count existing pre-orders.
That’s one way to make a campaign look more popular than it really is. I mean sure, over a thousand people have pledged large amounts of money to get one of the company’s phones. But they did that when they thought the phones would ship in the first half of 2015. I wonder how many of those people will cancel their pre-orders now that the phone’s not shipping until the second half of the year… and if Indiegogo will reflect canceled orders.
via Juggly, Droid Life and Android Police
Comes September this phone will no longer be appeal with 801. Thats why I request a refund when they pushes back the date of delivery. Lucky me!
There should be a hall of shame for these campaigns. I nominate Karma.
interesting. who needs that much storage space on a phone? The Indiegogo is a bit odd for a project that should be pretty far down the track. Got burned big time by the Agent smartwatch Kickstarter. Spending $600 on a project like this is a pretty big risk. They should offer a much bigger incentive.