On September 19, Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, released its second encrypted phone "Seeker" at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore. Seeker was previously called "chapter 2" and has received widespread attention since its launch in January this year. The official announcement shows that the pre-sale of Seeker has exceeded 140,000 units.
Unlike before, Seeker is equipped with a mobile-first Seed Vault wallet and integrates the new Solana dApp store. In this article, PANews will take users on a quick tour of this long-awaited Web3 phone.
Integrate the new version of dApp store, expected to be released in the middle of next year
According to the official introduction, the name Seeker was inspired by the idea that users are trying to "find new opportunities", whether it is rewards, experiences or connections.
According to the official description, Seeker will have significant hardware improvements over Solana Mobile's first encrypted phone, Saga, with better battery performance, better camera performance, and a lighter design than Saga. Seeker is priced at $450, which will remain until the end of Breakpoint on September 21, and Seeker is expected to be shipped in mid-2025.
The main features announced so far for the Solana Seeker include the Seed Vault wallet, a mobile-first crypto wallet that integrates natively with the device’s built-in self-hosted Seed Vault, with fast transactions and simple account management. The wallet was created by Solflare specifically for the Seeker.
At the same time, both Saga and Seeker are based on the Android system. The Seeker phone also integrates the Solana dApp Store 2.0, which has a new reward tracker and improved application discovery functions, covering applications in payment, DeFi, DePIN, NFT, artificial intelligence and gaming.
Similar to Saga, purchasers of Seeker receive a Seeker Genesis Token — a uniquely bonded NFT that unlocks rewards, exclusive access, offers, and content across the Solana ecosystem.
Not only that, but the Seeker's hardware is a significant improvement over its predecessor, including lighter weight, a brighter display, enhanced camera capabilities, and longer battery life.
In addition, Seeker has also significantly reduced the price. Previously, the Saga phone was priced at $1,000 when it was released, and later dropped to $599. Seeker set the pre-sale price at $450, less than half of the Saga price.
Solana Mobile General Manager Emmett Hollyer said that Seeke should not be judged based on its price reduction. Solana Mobile is very ambitious in its pricing and hopes it can achieve growth. He said, "We don't think of this as a price reduction."
The first generation of Saga successfully "counterattacked", Solana Labs regained confidence
As the successor to Solana Saga, Seeker reflects Solana’s determination to once again bet on its mobile phone product line. Solana’s mobile phone product line once faced the crisis of failure. The previous generation product Saga fell into trouble last year due to poor sales, but later crypto users discovered that buying the device could get a token airdrop with a value higher than the device itself, which brought Saga back to life.
Last April, several memecoin projects issued token airdrops for the Solana Chapter 2 phone, and users only needed to fill in the Solana wallet address they filled in when pre-ordering. Two cat-themed memecoins stood out, namely 37,600 Cat in a Dogs World (MEW) airdropped on April 1 and 5,199 Maneki (MANEKI) tokens airdropped on April 24. If the buyers did not sell these memecoins, the value of these two airdrops once reached $504 at a peak around April, and the price of the phone was only $450, which users could easily get back.
Eight months later, Saga's sales suddenly increased more than 10 times between December 14 and December 15, mainly driven by the airdrop of Solana's puppy-themed token BONK. Buyers of Saga phones only need to mint Genesis tokens through their phones and use them to receive 30 million BONK token airdrops. The initial dollar value of these BONK airdrops was about $10, and later the token value was close to $700. The airdrop value of multiple MEME tokens has far exceeded the price of the Saga phone itself, which has also led to a shortage of sales of the phone. Saga's successful counterattack has restored Solana Labs' confidence and pushed them to continue to integrate encryption technology more deeply into mobile devices and develop exclusive hardware and software.
With the success of its predecessor, the expectations for the release of the new Seeker mobile phone are very high, and Solana has received more than 100,000 pre-orders in early 2024. Solana Mobile officials stated at TOKEN 2049 that based on these capital injections and the trust commitment of buyers, Solana Mobile has successfully obtained a more favorable supply chain agreement than the first generation of products.
Compared to the 20,000 devices Saga produced worldwide, the number of pre-orders for Seeker is now seven times the amount of Saga's production, not to mention that the full hardware specifications of the new phone have not yet been announced. But can Seeker reproduce the "legend" of Saga? Let's look forward to its performance.
