BARCELONA—Hardware is hard. Nobody knows that more than Saygus, a start-up phone maker that is at this point a cautionary tale in how hard it is to build your dreams. Here at Mobile World Congress, though, Saygus founder Chad Sayers insists the long wait is over—and the Saygus V Squared smartphone will finally start to appear next month.
"We expect to have the first 3,000 finished and ready in the first shipping phase next month," Sayers said. The phone will enter the FCC's testing labs the second week of March, he said. Take this with a grain of salt.
Saygus raised $1.3 million in an Indiegogo campaign to support the V Squared last year. At this show, Sayers unraveled a sad tale of multiple failed Chinese manufacturing partners. This is why I'm nervous about other phone start-ups like Nextbit, by the way. Sayers said that Saygus has been through five manufacturing partners, variously being delayed, having contractual issues or just plain being ignored by the manufacturers that were supposed to produce it.
"We got hung up twice in the last year [with manufacturers,]" Sayers said. "We sat for four weeks waiting for a working sample, and week number five, said 'you're gone.' That was three manufacturers ago," he said.
Even if it does appear soon, the V Squared's long, long road to market may still make it a tough sell. The latest version of the phone is a slightly ruggedized, water-and-soap-proof Android 6.0 phone with dual-SIM card slots, dual MicroSD card slots, 60GHz wireless HDMI, and a USB-C 3.0 port. The phone runs mostly stock Android, and is rootable with an unlocked bootloader.
Other specs include a 5-inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, 21-megapixel and 13-megapixel cameras, an IR transciever, a remoavble 3100mAh battery and wireless charging. This all looked really stunning in early 2015, but less shocking in early 2016, especially once you hear Sayers say the phone will probably cost $650.
Saygus has also stuck with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, which makes the phone look old. Sayers said the 801 still has great performance, and he's right, but it's still an old chip. A new version of the Saygus, available by Christmas, may have the newer Snapdragon 820, he said.
"This chipset is awesome; we saw nothing to upgrade to until the 820," Saygus's Jason Player said.
The phone will support LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/13/17/25/26/41, which makes it compatible with all four of the U.S. carriers' networks. It will also support both GSM and CDMA, and Saygus is still working towards getting certified by Verizon, Sayers said.
Given that Saygus is the phone company which has been crying wolf practically since the pre-industrial era, I'd be very cautious about assuming that this phone will actually come to market. But if it does, I'll be very happily surprised. It'll be the end of a long road.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.