Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, launched its second crypto phone “Seeker” at the TOKEN 2049 conference in Singapore.
Seeker, previously known as "chapter 2", has received widespread attention since its launch in January this year, and official pre-sales of Seeker have exceeded 140,000 units.
Unlike before, Seeker is equipped with a mobile-first Seed Vault wallet and integrates the new version of Solana dApp store. The integration of the new version of the dApp store is 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 ship 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 capabilities, 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 compared to the Saga, the Seeker's hardware is a significant improvement over its predecessor, including a lighter weight, brighter display, enhanced camera capabilities, and longer battery life.
In addition, Seeker has also made a significant price cut. 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 the price of Saga.
Solana Mobile General Manager Emmett Hollyer said that Seeke should not be judged based on its price reduction, Solana Mobile is very ambitious with its pricing and hopes it will grow, saying, "We don't view this as a price reduction."
The first generation Saga successfully "rebounded" and Solana Labs regained confidence. As the successor product of Solana Saga, Seeker reflects Solana's determination to bet on the mobile product line again. Solana's mobile 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 made Saga "resurrected".
Last April, several memecoin projects airdropped tokens for the Solana Chapter 2 phone, using the Solana wallet address that users entered when pre-ordering. Two cat-themed memecoins stood out: 37,600 Cat in a Dogs World (MEW) airdropped on April 1, and 5,199 Maneki (MANEKI) tokens airdropped on April 24. The value of these two airdrops peaked around April at $504 if the buyer had not sold the memecoins, which would have easily paid back the price of the phone at $450.
Eight months later, Saga’s sales suddenly increased more than 10 times between December 14 and December 15, mainly driven by the Solana ecosystem puppy-themed token BONK airdrop. Buyers of Saga phones only need to mint Genesis tokens through their phones and use them to receive 30 million BONK tokens airdropped. 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 driven the sales of the phone to be in short supply. The successful counterattack of Saga has restored Solana Labs’ confidence and prompted them to continue to integrate encryption technology more deeply into mobile devices and develop exclusive hardware and software.
With the success of the previous work, the expectations for the release of the new mobile phone Seeker are very high. 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 pre-order volume of Seeker is now 7 times the production volume of Saga, not to mention that the complete hardware specifications of the new phone have not yet been announced. But can Seeker reproduce the "legend" of Saga? Let us look forward to its performance together.
