It's totally misleading of the article to suggest this phone is a success in any way. Building a phone (even on top of a rebranded device) is incredibly hard and expensive and unfortunately they didn't raise anywhere near enough money to even try.
The Volla Phone met an arbitrary goal of raising 20k, but they were clearly using the common KickStarter tactic of setting a really low initial goal that they hoped to blow past to build press and enthusiasm. But then unfortunately they... didn't. And they only tried this second approach after running a previous campaign to raise 350,000 euros and getting no where close.
Selling ~50 phones and not even managing to sell out the "early bird" option is the opposite of a successful KickStarter launch. They didn't even raise enough money to pay a single developer, let alone deliver an entire custom OS. And it's clear from the demo video that they don't have much software built yet. There's just no way they could deliver on their promises with the tiny amount of money raised.
I'd be surprised if this is even enough money to cover the time to purchase, box and ship out the 50 re-branded phones to the backers without installing any custom OS. I hope they decide to either just return the money or immediately ship out unmodified phones instead of trying to build their custom software. They just didn't get enough money to do that and it would most likely lead to pain and disappointment on all sides to even try.
> It's totally misleading of the article to suggest this phone is a success in any way.
It sounded to more like the Kickstarter succeeded, which usually means they just hit their goal. If you read the article, it doesn't claim anywhere that the phone itself is a success.
That said, I agree with pretty much everything else you said.
From my knowledge of the phone industry, and one of out past client's venture into it, the minimal viable budget for a cellphone project is $1M these days on the low side.
- MOQs of all truly essential assemblies are huge: high-end PCBs, custom made camera modules, custom cut LCD/OLED cells, antenna-body integrated assemblies
- RnD is long and torturous, even without Android atrocity: RF-tuning for high perf wireless, tiny high density PCBs development, lots of prototyping for bodywork and LCD assemblies
- SCM challenges are monumental even for factories in South China: constant shortages and high lead times of speciality passives, time spent waiting for parts, while burning money, logistics to and from module integrators...
Smartphones are becoming like jet engines: while parts count in general go down per unit of functionality, and they become simpler for non-IC parts of the design, very few can make them competitively as the supply chain gets longer, and 3rd parties are now taking bigger and bigger cuts with each year.
Also the campaign seems to be lazy copy+paste edit of an earlier (failed?) one. Mentions of "if we reach our stretch goals" in the perks but there are no such goals mentioned.
Don't need R&D or custom parts if you use existing designs and existing part lines from China. This is the same design used by many Xiaomi phones and lots of clones/rebrands. Someone mentioned even Siemens has one.
> Hardware is less exciting to me than the Software, and the Operating systems. Competition there would be nice
Thank you, I'm glad someone is saying it. Smartphone hardware matured several years ago, where even a $10 Walmart prepaid phone is good enough for everything except mobile gaming. It's long past time we had more than iOS and Android to choose from as a first class citizen. I realize there will likely never be a competitive third party OS on mobile (even a behemoth like Microsoft gave up just when their mobile OS was getting really, really good), but I'd settle for just the ability to buy an affordable device that can run whatever I want to put on it.
With this device, the PinePhone, and (holding my nose) the Librem 5, we now have enough choices on the hardware side to give the OS devs incentive to make their offerings polished enough to be daily drivers.
If the 10$ smartphone you mentioned actually exists, I'd like to know how I (as a German in Germany) could buy a couple. At that price point I'd feel comfortable degrading them to a wall-mounted light switch or doorbell repeater. Generic IoT stuff.
They exist and you can get them at Walmart, Family Dollar, and other bargain-basement stores. They are at that price point because the prepaid carrier (usually TracFone or similar) expects the buyer to purchase blocks of "minutes" and "megabytes" to use with the phone. It's basically a loss leader.
Just use old phones from eBay :). More like 50 Euros, but still rather cheap and powerful enough for any IoT use.
Reminds me of that guy who used an iPad for a wall mounted information panel (weather, transport time, traffic conditions, some other stuff). Pretty cool.
They are NOT manufacturing a phone from scratch. Read my detailed post on this thread. At first I thought this campaign was crazy, but it might actually be OK. You have to dig deeper into the numbers.
Big companies lost interest in licensing many year ago. Few companies have interest manufacturing Nexuses for Google these days, and smaller companies would get no chances at all.
HTC was the last big OEM amicable to co-branding or white label terms. They tried to build an own brand, and failed miserably because they failed to perceive how marketing works in the West. Maybe they will get more agreeable again.
Yeah, indeed, I'd wonder what'd happen if you asked i.e. oneplus to make a version of a model very open and start hacking away. Perhaps you can even convince them there is a market or that it is worth the experiment. Or would they fear Google?
Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android (that doesn't fly with e.g. Samsung making TVs with their OS and Sony making cameras that runs non-android I guess)?
Somehow it doesn't seem possible to prevent HTC from building one smartphone and sell it either themselves or via another brand as an android phone, while at the same time selling the same design (screen peripherals etc) with some minor chages, maybe a slightly different SoC, to someone who wants to sell a phone with a different OS? How exactly would the license forbid it?
Obviously google owns the license and can probably unilaterally revoke it for anything they see as unpleasant (such as building OEM phones that run linux, instead of just TVs that do?) - but is this really expressed explicitly in their agreement? How?
> Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android
It is the other way around companies that produce Google Android phones (with play store) are banned from producing anything Android not based on Googles stack. Amazon had to find out the hard way that basing your OS on Android makes it hard to find a manufacturer.
Of course this is not globally true. Various countries already informed Google just what they thought of that kind of licensing abuse. That led to Google carving out new licensing regions for every lawsuit and outright boycotting Turkey when they mandated the same treatment as the EU.
You can't produce a custom design based on Android since nearly all manufacturers signed a License agreement to only sell Android phones blessed by Google, this is required to sell even one phone with the Google software stack. Amazon already went through that with its Kindle product line.
According to the submission: "out-of-the-box support for community builds of Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS"
So even if it's not easily hackable or if MediaTek isn't famous for releasing kernel sources, seems like the company behind the phone will make sure at least Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS runs on it.
Edit: also, the sentence right your quote explains "In this case, however, Volla told us that its kernel sources should be publicly available"
Yeah, I'm thinking this is more like the Gemini (which turned out horrible, mine sits in a drawer unused) than the PinePhone. MediaTek is terrible, and I wouldn't be surprised if they need libhybris to get Sailfish and such working.
Let's cripple our project right from the beginning by including an ugly notch at the top, a "design feature" that tanked Essential, caused recent sales slip of new Nokia phones and forced even low-cost Chinese manufacturers to switch into drilling a circular hole in the display for placing camera in order to avoid its negative sales effects.
Actually a very sensible opinion. If anybody put a bare minimum effort to survey the market, they would've found that some no notch models are being sold solely because of that. If you make 2 similar models, one with notch, and one without the first will sink in sales, things are as simple as that.
Look at sales stats for Mi Max 3. Despite good sales Mi kills it, and then get surprised how their other models didn't get any sales kick, and then resuming Mi Max production.
Same with other brands having a "Waterloo moment" with models lacking 3.5mm jack. Samsung saw trashy sales on low and mid-level models without jacks, made models with jacks, then removed them again, and is now about to introduce new A and J series phones with jacks again. Some times they don't learn...
I think the same thing was with removable batteries and tf cards.
What was good for Apple, was a real poison for brands with a polar opposite identity to Apple.
I attribute HTC's demise highhandedly to them denying removable storage, and jacking storage prices, while few power user brands were hammering that point.
I can remember such cases where blindly chasing trendsetters kills many times, going back to 200X, and Nokia.
So many brands went under chasing Nokia because they were perceived as "cheaper, worse Nokia's" just as today some brands became "worse Iphones"
Still think it is opinion, why not see it as 2 extra flaps of display at the top? Why not cover those areas with display if you can? I certainly agree on the removable battery though.
I also hated that they removed the head phone jack. But I recently bought 16$ qcy bt headphones, never looked back. Personally I don't care much about notches and headphone jacks at all. The camera would now be my nr. 1 buying argument.
Because it leads to a very short status bar which annoys me a lot. And if I disable the notch to get a full status bar underneath it from settings, then the "flaps" get turned off system-wide for all apps so they're of no use.
Now I've switched back to my old notch-less phone and am much happier.
I hope some day, somebody will recognize that phones have become our everyday computers, and will create such a device.
A phone that is just that on it's own, but couple it with a dock and it becomes a desktop computer. It will of course require apps to have both phone and desktop UI variants, but given that most serious apps already have both phone and desktop versions i don't really see that as a major problem.
My current phone has just about as much RAM, CPU and GPU as my desktop machine has, so performance should be somewhat "desktop like".
I'm aware this is partially what Ubuntu tried to do with the Ubuntu Phone, but last i checked that project wasn't doing too well.
GNOME has been updating software to be resizable so that you can run normal GNU/Linux on a phone with the same programs. I think it's called libhandy. There's also the added benefit of being able to get the mobile UI on a computer to try out, or just to save space on your screen.
We will see this used on both the PinePhone and Librem 5.
I was surprised how useful Dex has become, and yet no one seems to speak about it.
Currently the only thing holding me back is that my particular phone (S9+) has fairly limited resolution support. IIRC the Note models are supposed to do much better as they have a discrete GPU for Dex output.
But basically all my day-to-day development tasks can be done on Dex and a SSH/terminal app.
I second your sentiment but the Android keyboard (external Bluetooth) is not very Linux friendly. I googled and experimented and there is no way to have an Esc key. I have to work in vi with control ], like on some broken terminal from the 80s. If anybody has a solution I'll pay with an upvote :-)
AFAICT, there are two main reasons it hasn't caught on:
1. It doesn't follow the normal technology adoption curve. Most tech is adopted first by technically savvy individuals who know how to deal with the "quirks" of living on the bleeding edge. And then evangelize it to the normies.
But a docked phone is for the normals, only techies need the power of a standalone computer.
2: A monitor + keyboard + dock can be more expensive and less convenient than a chromebook.
But it's an obvious idea and eventually it will happen. Once Google and/or Apple takes it seriously and integrate it into the base operating system, it'll slowly spread.
I was just thinking about Dex the other day. By any chance do you know if a simple USB C to HDMI cable will work? Or do you need a Samsung specific dongle?
Everybody seems to be stuck in the past, insisting on differentiating phones and desktops.
Smartphones are a relic from last decade. They were revolutionary when they arrived, and in a few years completely wiped out not only competing phones but also compact cameras, GPS gadgets and more.
Since then not much has changed. Apple invents something and Samsung etc, rushes to ridicule them and then copies the feature. Apple does the same (minus the ridicule). The smartphone innovation for the past 4-5 years has pretty much been limited to a missing headphone jack and a screen notch. Everything else has been incremental upgrades.
Still, the first iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the 3G model had an App Store but no apps in the beginning. And people still bought them.
The iPad was ridiculed when it was unveiled, and yet it seems like everybody has a tablet these days.
The smart watch was curiosity until Apple launched the Apple Watch, and it was ridiculed for being ugly. Millions of people bought them, and today they’re pretty well underway to disrupting the fitness tracker and health monitoring devices.
Bring the right technology along with a developer friendly environment and that could easily happen again if the technology is disruptive enough.
I don’t just want a phone that is half bad at showing desktop apps. I want a completely new device. Yes it will (probably) be a phone sized gadget, and you will (probably) be able to make calls from it, but it most likely won’t be 2G, 3G or 4G.
It will (probably) be a 5G device that isn’t a phone as we know it, but instead an internet connected device that does everything over the internet.
“Desktop” is also outdated. 5G is here, and with it fast internet for everything that has a processor. Screen technology has also advanced to the point that your wallpaper can almost become a monitor today.
Point your device at the wall (using existing technology like the U1 chip in current gen iPhones) and suddenly your dining room wall is a 4K Cinema Display being broadcast to from your phone.
Your kitchen wall or office wall could become a desktop display, again broadcast to from your phone.
It will be a door to the connected world 24/7. The companies will put me under surveillance sending tracking data back to the cloud at the speed of 5G. Very nice next gen tech
This has been tried several times. First one I remember was the Motorola Atrix in 2011. Performance might be better now, but it would fail for the same reason they always do: most people don’t want a phone with a Linux desktop.
And yet, Apple has been successfully pushing a Unix desktop for years.
It's all a matter of how it is wrapped. People don't want a linux desktop with the usual linux tools. People want a desktop/phone with an app store and "point & click".
People also want their usual apps, and we've come a long way in the past decade. Office apps are now on every major platform, and lets face it, Office apps are the bread and butter of desktop platforms. Messaging has moved from desktop messengers 20 years ago, to everything messaging living on a phone, to some extent also including email (which apparently refuses to die)
I don't know much about Android hardware, but the current generation of A13 processors in iPhones has nearly the (benchmark) performance of the low end 2019 Core i7 processor, which should be enough for a large part of users, including developers compiling stuff.
I agree that the next revolution probably won't come from a start up pushing "ready made" phones with a different skin/feature set. And i doubt anyone has the resources to make this happen but a few select players, like Apple, Google, Microsoft and IBM.
For this to work, all the apps that a person expects to see on their computer should be there, running on an ARM chip. So far, Microsoft hasn’t gotten traction there. Apple will of course pull macOS users along, but it’s been running away from modularity since the PowerBook Duo.
You say, it doesn’t have to be native apps - Google Docs, etc works great in the browser. Then you’re competing with Chromebooks, and I’m not sure a modular system can be as cheap as that.
Smartphones are a relic from last decade. They were revolutionary when they arrived, and in a few years completely wiped out not only competing phones but also compact cameras, GPS gadgets and more.
Since then not much has changed. Apple invents something and Samsung etc, rushes to ridicule them and then copies the feature. Apple does the same (minus the ridicule). The smartphone innovation for the past 4-5 years has pretty much been limited to a missing headphone jack and a screen notch. Everything else has been incremental upgrades.
Still, the first iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the 3G model had an App Store but no apps in the beginning. And people still bought them.
The iPad was ridiculed when it was unveiled, and yet it seems like everybody has a tablet these days.
The smart watch was curiosity until Apple launched the Apple Watch, and it was ridiculed for being ugly. Millions of people bought them, and today they’re pretty well underway to disrupting the fitness tracker and health monitoring devices.
Bring the right technology along with a developer friendly environment and that could easily happen again if the technology is disruptive enough.
As for competing with chromebooks, you’re essentially replacing X devices with a single device.
Of course you’d still need some kind of external display/monitor, but if connection to those can be wireless you could start seeing some really great combinations.
How about a screen you can fold/roll up and keep in your jacket ? Or just a “notepad” that is a monitor ?
Or in a few years when everything with a processor is probably 5G enabled, and every wall panel is a potential display ? Point your device at the wall (using existing technology like the U1 chip in current gen iPhones) and suddenly your dining room wall is a 4K Cinema Display being broadcast to from your phone.
Your kitchen wall or office wall could become a desktop display, again broadcast to from your phone.
Pine64 has revisited the concept with the PinePhone, which has gotten quite a bit of attention in the UBPorts community (what Ubuntu Touch turned into).
I think/hope it's just a matter of time. Devices are getting fast enough as far as I can see. Apart from Ubuntu Phone there's Samsung Dex as another commenter metionds, and I think Microsoft Continuum was announced even before those existed. But also dropped dead together with Windows Phone IIRC; unfortunately because it looked pretty good.
Been thinking along the same lines. The reason dockable mobile computers still don't exist is more to do with software than hardware.
I believe all mainstream OS's we have today, coming from the pre-mobile era are simply not suitable for this task. If it was possible at least Apple would have built a docakble computer already, and I'm sure they have considered it but probably realized their OS will be the bottleneck. It's already too heavy, there's too much legacy, and a complete rewrite would be an insurmountable task for them.
This problem requires a new, much more efficient and compact kernel/OS that will be free from the legacy of the pre-mobile era. Something designed specifically for low-power mobile devices, possibly with conceptually new kind of a file system with (I actually have some ideas what it could be).
Anyway, just some vague intuitive insights. This is an interesting problem, a niche that's opening in front of us right now, just begging to be filled with something new.
>Apple would have built a docakble computer already, and I'm sure they have considered it but probably realized their OS will be the bottleneck.
I doubt the OS itself will be a bottleneck. All of Apple's devices from phones to computers pretty much run the same kernel. A lot more devices from supercomputers to toasters run Linux. I'd say the OS is already here.
I had high hopes for Apple's Marzipan toolkit, and time will tell if it becomes what i hope it will, but for now it mostly seems to be a way for iOS developers to bring dumbed down applications to the Mac.
And ultimately we'll all end up with a bunch of Electron apps doing almost what we want, only slower.
OS is not a bottleneck. And to me, being able to run existing desktop software on the Phone when docked would be pretty much all that would be useful about this.
But that's my point: the reason it doesn't exist to date is the OS, not because nobody thought about it. I'm sure a lot of people did, some even tried to build a device. A more lightweight and efficient OS would make it more feasible.
There's a ton of various lightweight DE's for GNU/Linux for example. I can run Arch Linux/i3wm just fine on my PinePhone.
Actually being a highly portable Arch Linux/i3wm device is what PinePhone does best at the moment for me. lol
And people certainly thought about it. Phone manufacturers just actively work against people running alternative OSes on their phones, by locking up their devices, and making it annoying to unlock them, and by not respecting GPL, and releasing code with huge delays and in a very halfassed manner, and by ignoring calls to upstream their code.
How can 20k euros buy a phone? I doesn't make any sense, unless it already exists and this is "only" a branding effort. The kickstarter mentions Gigaset, do they have a ready Ubuntu Phone already?
To be fair, this particular design seems to be one of those common Chinese ones used by any company who wants to make a phone. It's really easy to assemble, hard to disassemble. It's been used in countless Xiaomi phones, lesser known Chinese brands, even Samsung seems to have borrowed from it.
It's the same basic design as the OnePlus 6/6t, boards and battery glue sandwiched between two pieces of glass (the front one being the screen itself). If they skip on the material and fit quality (like Xiaomi does), it can be done for really cheap in any semi-decent factory.
If my experience with anything MediaTek still holds, they better use a good heatsink, because their chips get hot, and they die from it, too.
We have few Xiaomi phone users in our office. We noticed that a same model phones can physically differ by few millimetres and actually have a bit different hardware internally like sensors, and etc.
Xiaomi apparently sources multiple OEM models from multiple suppliers for sale under one label
eg. for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 there are two variants "nikel (Mediatek) has 6 speaker holes on each side, while mido (Qualcomm Snapdragon) has 5. Mediatek also has screws on each side of the micro-USB port."
It looks to be like rebranded Gigaset GS290... They put their logo on the case and install some other OS for you and sell it for 50€ more than the original one...
I also looked at specs...and agree it does look like the Gigaset GS290, and yes it 50 euros more - only if you live outside the EU/Europe! Otherwise if you live inside EUrope, its 100 euros more. For a phone that they say will be made in EUrope.
So it does somewhat feel like you are better off buying a phone that has good alternative OS support (like an older Samsung or other popular model of yesteryear) and a case of your choice and ending up with something cheaper and better.
Also this free VPN, it's a 3rd party.
Well Willyfox released a phone and promised advert free truecaller for life - I can attest that was a lie. So be mindful of such 3rd party services they offer as you have no guarantee with that.
Also of most importance: "DISCLAIMER: Please note that the device is only CE certified and importation into countries outside the EU and EFTA states may be refused by customs."
So they will sell you a phone that you legally may not be able to use and possibly be blocked by customs and in that situation - I suspect they will just point to that disclaimer and say told you so without any way to resolve you outlay. THAT is something to be most mindful of.
Surely 20k isn't enough to manufacture a phone. Even the tools themselves would cost more than that, let alone purchasing components. Unless they're CNCing the housing for every device
I just want a hand-sized general-purpose tablet with a 5g modem I can plug in when I need a phone. I like the 'security by isolation' aspect of physically unplugging my cellular connectivity. Otherwise I piggyback on Google Voice for texts/calls. Also bring back physical slide-out keyboards like the Motorola Sidekick.
Kinda feel they would be better off providing an OS reflash service for a 50 euro fee of a range of phones they could expand over time. Given this is just a rebrand of an existing phone as many have pointed out.
Current street pricing for this phone appears to be around €269.
Volla is getting from €298 to €359 for them (Let's ignore the t-shirts, books, etc.).
If we assume they are buying the phones for, say, 25% off, their COGS is around €200 per unit. In other words, they are getting paid between €100 and €159 to develop software and support their version of the phone. In the case of the KS campaign, that amounts to about €5000 and €7950.
There are other possible business arrangements that are often negotiated in these kinds of deals. For example, Gigaset manages fulfillment under the Volla brand and they split the profits. That would imply zero upfront costs to Volla. That's the kind of deal I would want to make if I were in their shoes. Don't deal with hardware if you don't have to. Hardware is hard and very expensive.
I am going to guess or assume (and we know how dangerous assumptions can be) that the bulk of the software has already been developed and might even be in release-able condition. I make this assumption because they've been at this crowd-sourcing thing for a while.
In other words, they have sunk costs. And it might very well be that they don't really have to invest much more to actually deliver these modified COTS phones. In that context the €5K to €8K they just raised (after paying for the hardware) might be fine. It's a signal rather than a bankroll needed to produce phones. They are NOT manufacturing hardware from scratch. At worst they might have custom printed packaging, which costs nothing.
I then looked into Gigaset. It's a solid company. Used to be Siemens Home. Now 70% owned by Goldin Group out of Hong Kong (which puts into question just how much is really "Made in Germany"). Still, this is a real company with real products. Therefore, there is no reason to doubt the hardware at all.
One way I came out of this is to consider the idea that, if the Volla software does not work out for whatever reason users might be able to reprogram their phones with the standard Gigaset software and life goes on. If this is the case, and you like Gigaphone, this deal has basically zero risk. You are paying a relatively small premium to try a proposal that may or may not work. Which is fine. Good project.
The Volla Phone met an arbitrary goal of raising 20k, but they were clearly using the common KickStarter tactic of setting a really low initial goal that they hoped to blow past to build press and enthusiasm. But then unfortunately they... didn't. And they only tried this second approach after running a previous campaign to raise 350,000 euros and getting no where close.
Selling ~50 phones and not even managing to sell out the "early bird" option is the opposite of a successful KickStarter launch. They didn't even raise enough money to pay a single developer, let alone deliver an entire custom OS. And it's clear from the demo video that they don't have much software built yet. There's just no way they could deliver on their promises with the tiny amount of money raised.
I'd be surprised if this is even enough money to cover the time to purchase, box and ship out the 50 re-branded phones to the backers without installing any custom OS. I hope they decide to either just return the money or immediately ship out unmodified phones instead of trying to build their custom software. They just didn't get enough money to do that and it would most likely lead to pain and disappointment on all sides to even try.