ZTE’s crowdsourced Project CSX smartphone is now known as Hawkeye, and is also available for backing through Kickstarter. The phone itself will be built using ideas sourced from ZTE’s customers and supporters which were submitted last year.
Not much is known about Hawkeye’s internal specifications yet, although ZTE is likely taking its time to fill in those blanks. From what we can tell, the name is a reference to a feature that allows users to scroll across screens using eye movement. A feature that was originally proposed during the portion of the project where ZTE crowdsourced ideas.
Eye scrolling isn’t the only user suggestion that made it to the final product. The other happens to be a feature that allows the Hawkeye to stick to any surface using a specialised casing. Some people seem to think that this will be a useful feature, and ZTE appears to have listened to them. We have no idea how this will work in practice.
Other known features are the 5.5-inch display, dual rear cameras, fingerprint sensor, expandable memory, and Android Nougat. All of which for a surprisingly low backing price of $199 (about RM900). The catch is that ZTE set a goal of $500,000 for this campaign, and it currently looks like the reception to the idea has been rather lukewarm.
There’s something to be said about large corporations using Kickstarter to fund their projects, although we assume that ZTE is simply keeping with the idea of full crowdsourced smartphone in doing this. On the other hand, the last time this happened with Pebble it turned out that the company was bleeding money and was eventually sold to a competitor.
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