Solana Saga First Unboxing Test in China: Is a $1,000 Web3 Phone Really Worth Buying?

By Yobo, Foresight News

Written at the front: Thanks to Daniel of Solana Foundation for his human flesh cross-border express service, let me experience this hard-to-buy mobile phone, I hope he will not block me after reading it.

**Saga is cool, whether it's the story behind it, or the special meaning that Solana gives it to Web3. **

**But Saga is not good enough, at least as a mobile phone with a price enough to be a flagship, the degree of completion is too far away. **

In 2014, Andy Rubin, known as the father of Android, resigned from Google and received a huge resignation compensation of up to 90 million US dollars, and his legendary life ushered in a somewhat bad turning point. In 2017, Andy launched his first mobile phone, the EssentialPhone. Today, this mobile phone that is always bound to the "father of Android" is still sought after by garbage guys, but Essential's poor product design and unreasonable official price, It failed to get enough Android users to recharge their faith, and the Essential company soon declared bankruptcy.

In 2021, some members of the Essential team once again tested the mobile phone market with the OSMO brand, and officially announced the first mobile phone OSO MOV1, but the story of the comeback is still full of thorns. In June last year, OSOM announced that OV1 was officially renamed, and the protagonist of this article The name, thus surfaced - Saga.

The previous generation flagship processor of Snapdragon 8+, combined with dual cameras, since the era of Snapdragon 845 (Qualcomm’s flagship chip has been iterated 7 times since then, and has gone through a complete cycle from ice dragon to fire dragon to ice dragon ) After the end, there is no back fingerprint module that has appeared on flagship mobile phones. At the moment when Sony stuffed a 5000mah battery into a body of less than 190g, he made a small 4200mah battery a full 247g . Judging from the parameters, a series of incredible combinations, coupled with a price of $1,000, feels worthy of at least five "good guys" emotions. This time, is Saga going to let users suffocate for "faith"?

With my mind full of question marks, I played with this phone for a few days. Although the lack of hardware has made its upper limit nailed to a low level, some novel attempts may really attract people. To a small number of digital geeks who will be "killed" by curiosity.

Closer to home, let me start with the core part of the Saga product premium - "Solana Ecology" and "Seed Bank + dApp Application Store".

(PS: If you are more interested in the product itself, you can also skip the next chapter and read the regular unpacking part first, but a friendly reminder, after skipping and reading, please remember to come back to this position and read about The most important reason why Saga can change from OV1 to Saga.) Solana, seed library...everything you can't see on ordinary mobile phones

Seed Vault (seed library) hosting solution is an important function that you can perceive when you open and activate Saga for the first time. The wallet mnemonic will be stored in a local secure environment and supports fingerprint quick signature, etc. operate. During the process of activating the mobile phone, it will prompt to create or bind the Solana wallet. Users who are familiar with wallet operations should not have any obstacles, just import the mnemonic words.

The wallets supported by default include Phantom and Solflare. There is no threshold for the operation of wallet binding. When the seed library has been set up, only fingerprint verification and confirmation are used.

After binding, you can receive 20USDC and 0.01SOL tokens, which are used to lower the threshold for new users to experience Solana ecological applications. In addition, you can also receive Saga commemorative NFT airdrops.

As of writing, the built-in dApp application market of mobile phones has 36 applications on the shelves, and the application types cover wallets, DeFi, NFT, social, audio and video, games and browsers.

After a simple experience of MagicEden, it is very simple to use fingerprints for signature verification, but occasionally an error will be reported during the verification process, and it needs to be tried once or twice. Is it caused by a network problem in a case, and more time is needed to verify.

In addition to the applications already on the shelves, Saga also supports calling and interacting with the SeedVault quick link wallet after the browser directly opens the Solana application. However, compared with the dApps that are already on the shelves, this operation has a higher probability of failure, and some applications also have cases where clicking the connect wallet button is completely invalid.

When downloading an application from the dApp application market, I encountered a risk being prompted by GooglePlay. Web2 and Web3 are really incompatible (manual dog head.jpg).

I deliberately went to experience Mintyfresh, which has been officially "named and praised", which is a dApp that generates NFTs from pictures or camera content with one click. The interaction logic is very simple, just connect the wallet - select the picture - mint, and you're done. However, I tested several pictures and failed to upload them to the chain due to unknown errors. Due to the rush of time, the problem was not completely resolved. At present, Web3 applications have indeed implemented some user-friendly functions, but the problem of user experience is still a long way to go.

However, Saga at least allows us to see another possibility other than the Apple AppStore and various Android app stores, one that can bypass the complicated review process and allow creators and developers to release their imagination more directly. And it is possible to further shorten the distance between application publishers and users. And isn't this exactly what Web3 wants to achieve?

Starting from the mobile phone with the highest frequency of daily use, it simplifies the interaction logic of the mobile terminal, allowing more people to more directly access the excellent dApps in the ecosystem on the chain. Solana’s attempt this time may seem clumsy at present, but I think the future imagination space is enough to look forward to.

Seriously open a box

Next, forget about the platform you are reading this article on, we return to a normal mobile phone out of the box.

The size of the mobile phone packaging box can be seen and should be very environmentally friendly. Don’t even think about the charging head. The texture of the plastic seal is worrying. At least for the price of 1,000 knives, it must be unqualified, but Wild America may not care about these.

Compared with the sloppy plastic packaging, the pulling method of the packaging itself is much more comfortable to handle, and it can get full marks without using a very stupid button-type lid.

Take them all out to take pictures as souvenirs. Except for the phone body, other things should never come out of the cabinet again.

In the past half a year, the author's main force + backup is the combination of iPhone12 pro + Flip3, so the first feeling of Saga is heavy. The texture of the whole machine is better than expected, the metal treatment of the frame is very good, the 2.5D glass can ensure that the edge does not cut when sliding, and the matte texture metal has a higher anti-fingerprint ability than the bright stainless steel that the Apple Pro series has used for several years. I don't know how many grades, the obsessive-compulsive disorder is much more comfortable. Needless to say, the hand feel of the ceramic backplane is not as good as the anti-fingerprint glass that has been specially treated, but the warm and moist feeling of the ceramic is obvious.

Although the mention of the rear camera module is getting more and more outrageous when the mobile phone image rolls to the explosion, the Saga’s rear camera bump is not high, but because the shape of the module is triangular, the bottom of the bump is an area The corner of the triangle is relatively small, and the shaking perception is obvious when the screen is placed on the table facing up. If you are willing to add a mobile phone case, you can basically solve the problem. In addition, it is already heavy enough, let's run naked.

The big regret on the front is that the front camera is not coated in black, and I even suspect that it is designed in the style of this silver circle. This behavior of directly destroying the integrity is a bit confusing.

The three buttons on the side are turned green to add a lively feeling, but one is that green seems to have nothing to do with Solana, and the other is that the power button is so small and placed in the golden position of the right thumb. In the past few days, the frequency of misoperation is still quite high, and the bonus item has been successfully brought back to the level of no merit.

boot.

Activation requires scientific access to the Internet, otherwise WiFi will always remind you that you cannot access the network, even if you skip online activation and directly enter the system. But in fact, there is no problem accessing websites inside the wall, so I don’t need to continue talking about what you can do.

The system is the standard native Android. The factory is Android 13. I don’t know how many major version upgrades the official can push. The factory only has Google Family Bucket and nothing else. It is very comfortable.

The screen has three refresh rates (60, 90, 120) to choose from, and the fineness of the first glance is not bad. After all, the resolution of 2400✖1080 can already be called a 2K screen for domestic manufacturers.

However, the color of this screen is a bit explosive, the redness is serious under the light-colored background, and it is the same under all brightness levels. I feel that this is why this machine is turned on the dark mode by default. As a light-colored party, I used it for a short time. After a few hours, I honestly switched back to dark mode.

It takes about 15-16 times to enroll a finger with the rear fingerprint, which is not an unexpected "nostalgic" operation.

As for the camera, the main camera is the IMX766 that Huawei has already polished. However, after all, the algorithm was removed more than two years ago, so there is no need to expect much. The wide-angle is IMX373, which is the sensor used in the front camera of Mi 6X released 5 years ago. You can say "retro" or not "retro". I randomly took a few proofs, not looking at the composition but only at the color reproduction.

The overall style is a standard saturation fighter. It is no surprise that the 766 is full of oldness without Huawei's algorithm. The large red area in Figure 4 becomes a mess under this operation. The details are not good in the case of sufficient light, and the uploaded image has been compressed several times, so it is estimated that the details cannot be seen. The stamens in the original picture in Figure 2 have a more obvious sense of oil painting. In this kind of scene where the thousand yuan machine can already handle the main camera part, there is a gap of one eye. The antique wide-angle and night scene are really nothing to look forward to. Simply put two samples to see.

This wide-angle lens has nothing to do with the center image quality or edge image quality, as well as the edge anti-distortion algorithm and anti-purple fringing. It perfectly presents the image quality level of the front camera 5 years ago.

What should I say about the night scene, emmmm, because I turned on the night scene mode in a not so dark environment, and got the picture on the left, while the right side was randomly pressed with the default mode of S23Ultra, I don’t know what to say up.

Add an interesting point, Saga missed some content when customizing the system, the product name of OSMO still has a point in the camera.

With such a large screen + high refresh rate and a small battery less than 4200mAh, it is inevitable that the battery life will suffer from diabetes insipidus. The daily screen time is basically only about 4 hours. If you sit in front of the table every day and have charging conditions, it is not a big problem. Once you go out, it will add to the anxiety. The charging speed is still far behind the domestic Android, and this amount should be used on the ceramics and the middle frame.

One big problem is that although the mobile phone supports wireless charging, the position of the wireless charging coil needs to be found very accurately. The Xiaomi 80W I am using is very friendly to the iPhone and Samsung in my hand. Basically, I can charge it with peace of mind if I throw it away. But Saga has to be placed very upright, and it is often disconnected during charging, making the experience very embarrassing.

As for the external speakers, pre-effects and game experience, I won’t go into details here. From the perspective of temperature control performance, it can be regarded as an 8+ performance without too many restrictions. Games such as Yuanshen that run at a software level have a foundation of 8+ It is definitely possible to play, but it is definitely not possible to play comfortably all the time. I believe that no one will use such a mobile phone with a small battery as the main game machine. Too many use scenarios in the non-positioning direction have limited meaning.

Summary

If Saga removes the blessing part of Solana ecology, according to the current domestic Android pricing idea, such a machine with an old flagship chip, even considering the configuration combination of 12+512, ceramic back cover and workmanship, such a small battery and Screen performance, a reasonable price is difficult to exceed 3,000 yuan, which means that more than half of the price of this mobile phone needs to be reflected through the Solana ecology.

Therefore, are you willing to pay for this deeply integrated interactive experience and Solana ecological applications? Or are you willing to pay for trying to break the homogeneous involution status quo of the mobile phone market by opening the application channel on the chain? That's the question you really need to think about before buying this phone.

However, after three days of simple experience, I have inserted the mobile phone card in Flip3 into Saga, making him my Android main force. After all, as a digital product enthusiast, what I want is to hope that the technological iteration of mobile phones will not make the product more and more boring. Even if it is wishful thinking, I am willing to pay for the little bit of bold attempt. Saga is not good enough, but he gave me the desire to "play" with a mobile phone that I haven't felt in recent years. Next, Solana ecology, looking forward to more surprises.