The Solana mobile devices will be available for delivery in early 2023 and will cost around $1,000.
The Osom OV1, built by a team of former engineers and designers from Essential, is being rebranded and repurposed for crypto.
In New York City this afternoon, blockchain company Solana announced its own mobile phone, the Saga, made in partnership with Osom. The device costs $1,000, and preorders open today. Solana says the Saga will be ready in the first quarter of 2023, with a $100 deposit required.
Besides its 6.67-inch OLED display, 512GB storage and 12GB of RAM, It will be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip. The device has a 50-megapixel primary camera as well as a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens.
Rather than on a laptop browser, Saga intends to implement digital asset products and services that will allow users to utilize their crypto on mobile devices.
“the Saga aims not only to expand cryptocurrency’s reach, but make it better via mobile.”
Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO of Solana
Along with Saga, Yakovenko also shared the development of Solana Mobile Stack, which is a web3 layer for Solana built for mobile devices. A dApp Store that will run on the Android-based Saga. With its new stack, which will be available to other Android device makers, it envisions a wide proliferation of crypto-native apps, digital services, and digital goods.
“We didn’t see a single crypto announcement at Apple’s developer conference, 13 years after Bitcoin went live,” Yakovenko said in a Q&A session. “I think it’s going to be up to us.”
The NFT marketplace Magic Eden, wallet maker Phantom, and cryptocurrency exchange Orca have joined forces to support the new software from Saga and Solana.
The CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, said at the event, “Everything is going mobile.”. In most countries, mobile phones are the primary device people use to access services, Bankman-Fried said. Currently, crypto products are not easily accessible on mobile devices, he added.