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Shortly after the Solana Saga debuted in 2023, the most smartly-liked tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, in any other case identified as MKBHD, launched a video titled “Right here’s a Crypto Phone. Don’t Aquire It.” Brownlee complained to his 20 million YouTube subscribers referring to the Saga’s mediocre specs, high sign and overly niche crypto parts.
Brownlee adopted that video with any other, naming the Solana Saga the greatest smartphone bust of 2023, which precipitated Solana Labs to humorous tale that it had launched an award-a success cell phone.
In constructing the Solana Seeker, Solana Cell appears to possess taken its critics critically, both reversing course or making main upgrades on the Saga’s passe parts. Overall, Solana Cell appears to possess exorcised its Saga demons to bid a in actual fact valid new cell phone within the Seeker.
My first impression of the Seeker was how gentle the cell phone is. I was unable to search out out its staunch weight, nonetheless the Seeker felt noticeably lighter than my co-employee’s iPhone. This was the foremost portion of evidence that Solana took its critics critically, after the Saga was broadly panned for being too heavy.
The portability will seemingly be helpful because quite so a lot of the Seeker’s 150,000 putative merchants might put it to use as a 2d cell phone, nonetheless that’s by no manner an indictment on the Seeker’s quality.
In stylish, the Seeker performs about apart from you might hope for a $500 cell phone in 2025. The battery life and portray are slightly valid. The digicam is solely appropriate nonetheless now not spectacular. The Mediatek Dimensity 7300 chip isn’t high-of-the-line, and the cell phone did feel a tiny hot in my fingers after a bout of heavy usage, nonetheless the Seeker on the full does the full lot I desire it to make without traipse or bugs.
Photograph provocative referring to the Seeker. Source: Jack Kubinec
Care for its predecessor, the Seeker comes with a constructed-in “seed vault,” which is that if fact be told a in actual fact valid manner to retailer crypto pockets keys. The cell phone comes with a native pockets that’s integrated with the seed vault and will seemingly be fingerprint-protected, so a thief wouldn’t be in a position to procure admission to it (until, for certain, they stole your finger as successfully). The pockets has a shares tab where non-US customers ought to buy xStocks, a new tokenized inventory product on Solana.
The Seeker has the Google Play retailer and parts the return of the Solana-native dApp Retailer. The dApp retailer has expanded particularly from 2023, when it featured fewer than two dozen apps. Now the retailer has successfully over 100 apps, just a few of that are fully on hand on the dApp retailer. No longer all dApp Retailer apps are created equal — the now-defunct Mango Markets has a (apparently non-helpful) app listed, let’s instruct — nonetheless Solana Cell granted just among the finest ones foremost trusty estate as featured apps.
Caitlin Cook, who works in growth at unquestionably one of those featured apps in Moonwalk, wired that turning precise into a Seeker birth associate was now not a paid partnership, and Solana mandatory to organically spotlight the new client crypto app.
“In phrases of the course of, getting listed on the Solana dApp retailer was a gentle scheme close for us. Since we already had a dwell Android app, it fully took just a few quick tweaks. From what I’ve viewed more broadly, the Solana Cell team has done a gigantic job encouraging teams to dawdle beyond browser-primarily primarily based fully UX and embody cell-native experiences in prep for the Seeker birth, and making the course of for doing so serene and painless,” Cook acknowledged.
