A Swedish entrepreneur, Jonathon Gustafsson, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring a ‘no compromises’ smartphone to the market.
The ‘Symetium’ looks like a traditional smartphone. However, it’s real intent is “[to] remove the line between mobile and desktop devices”. The design brief was to create a product with the same level of performance as a desktop PC, but with a mobile form factor.
A 5″ OLED display (1920 x 1080) certainly points to mobile, but the other specs are indeed more similar to a low- or mid-range notebook. 256GB of storage and 6GB of RAM are contained in the chassis, as well as a Snapdragon 820 chipset. It is also IP67-compliant – and only 6mm thick.
“With Symetium, I want to go past mobile operating systems and join the two together. It is time for phones to stop being phones as they are much more than that and have been for years”, said Gustafsson, who built the phone’s operating system himself. Based on Android 6.0, the OS is designed to work with a mouse, keyboard and/or touch controls.
In addition to the controls, Symetium is designed to work with various displays, via a portable dock or a USB connections. Multiple environments can be run without interrupting phone use – a completely different user interface to that shown on the phone can be sent to a display. A USB-C connection enables the 5″ handset to be connected to an HDMI display; once connected, it becomes a trackpad for the screen.
Gustafsson is targeting $1.25 million on Indiegogo to begin production. Estimated shipping date is July 2016.
