A distinctive feature Saga has is the “Solana Mobile Stack” (SMS) that links crypto functionality to the phone.
Solana Labs’ web3 smartphone Saga is ready for launch, and plans are in place for its public sale on the 8th of May. The company revealed that it has started shipping to customers who pre-ordered. Saga is finally ready about 10 months after Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced that the company would produce a web3 Android smartphone. While announcing the phone in New York City, Yakovenko said he believed that it is something the industry needs. He added that Apple did not include any crypto feature at its developer conference even though Bitcoin is now a household name. In his explanation, the CEO said crypto lovers need a phone to access related products without using a computer.
According to people who have had access to Saga, the new phone is packaged in a black box. In addition to the phone itself, the pack contains a USB-C charger and a tangible seed phrase paper card. The crypto-ready $1,000 device operates on Android 13 with a physical display of 6.67-inch OLED display and 512 GB of storage. There are also testimonies of the phone’s 4011 mAh battery that lasted 1 and a half days. It is advisable to set up the fingerprint as it is also a verification method to sign up for crypto transactions.
Solana Says Saga Is Ready
According to Solana, a distinctive feature Saga has is the “Solana Mobile Stack” (SMS) that links crypto functionality to the phone. The infrastructure also has security features that cover sending, trading, receiving, and storing crypto assets on the smartphone. Solana mentioned the “seed vault, which is a hack-resistant part of Saga that keeps confidential information. At the same time, it has a custom “dapp” that lists strictly crypto applications. For now, the Solana web3 phone has more than a dozen crypto-related applications. These applications cover crypto trading and inter-wallet communications. Also, music and digital collectibles are available for download on Saga as Solana plans to include more crypto products in the future.
As part of the dApp store welcome pack, Saga users receive $20 worth of USDC and 0.01 SOL, or 0.0026 of a dollar. The engineering lead at Solana Mobile noted:
“We’ve been reaching out and engaging with big players in the Solana ecosystem and those who recognize that mobile has won for everything else. A lot of developers are realizing mobile will win eventually and they want to be there when it happens.”
Saga rollout is indeed a landmark for the crypto industry and Solana, as other phone makers have previously failed in their efforts. HTC and Sirin Labs had tried developing crypto-forward smartphones that never saw daylight. Meanwhile, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried once said, “everything is going mobile…. Having web3-enabled devices with a hardware wallet in it is super powerful.”
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