I know what you’re saying out there. I can hear you.
“Who are Saygus?”
See. I can hear you. Sometimes I know when you’re making those secret trips into the kitchen for those cakes too.
To be honest I’d not heard a great deal about this company but, after spending a few minutes in their company, they’re pretty great. They’ve set out, basically, to “create a phone that we want to buy”.
After speaking to Tim Rush, VP of Public Relations, I think they’re done it. First of all though, I should point out that the images you see here are of the engineering samples, so you will have to forgive a few rough edges until the production units are ready. However, they do have some very impressive specifications.
Take, for example, the storage you can get in here. 320GB of space.
Go on, drink that in for a minute. 320GB. The hard drive in my laptop isn’t that big. It’s achieved thanks to the 64GB on-board storage and two microSD card slots. Put two 128GB microSD’s in and, combined with the phone storage, you’ve got a grand total of 320GB. That’s enough for your photos, your videos and perhaps even a few hundred music albums. Then a few more photos, and a few more videos. Perhaps a DVD or three.
Why not cloud? Well, why not. Cloud storage is good, but with data limits constantly getting turned down by mobile operators, you’ve got a lot of data trying to fit into smaller buckets each month. Even at home, on your WiFi, you’ll find that your phone breathes a sigh of relief, only to wear down the battery sync’ing all that video footage from your day out.
Then there’s the phone design and protection. This uses new-to-market waterproofing technology, so even if you do drop it in the bath those pictures and videos are secure. It’s got kevlar on the chassis. Kevlar. Actual kevlar that they use in combat helmets and bullet-proof vests.
Then here’s the quality of the insides. It’s got a 5″ Full HD 1920×1080 screen (445ppi) which has very little border and has Gorilla Glass 4. At the back sits a 21 megapixel shooter with OIS, auto-focus and a dual LED flash. Up front, a 13 megapixel camera with OIS and auto-focus. This isn’t a slouch, and there’s a dedicated camera button too.
Add to that the 3GB RAM, 2.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm CPU, GPS, sensors, 4G connectivity, dual-band WiFi (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz) plus NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, an IR transmitter, 3.5mm audio port, 3100mAh battery, wireless charging and you’re already looking at a powerful handset. There’s a fingerprint scanner too.
What they’ve also done is add some extra fun into the mix. A new 60GHz Wireless HD system will, when the product goes on sale with the associated TV dongle, push live and high quality smartphone screen images to your TV. There’s positively no lag and it’s great if you want to share your video onto a TV without the lag or having to first upload everything to the cloud..
For developers, you can easily have this delivered as a rooted phone, and it’ll support multi-boot so you can run an OS from the microSD card if you wish.
If you don’t fancy doing that, just turn up the tunes. Saygus have dropped in some Harmon Kardon speakers, with 3D audio. Those speakers were worked on by Harmon Kardon themselves, so you know they’re good. Oh, and even on the back (and something I’ve never seen before) is a fractal image that helps to boost signal.
Running stock Android, you’ll soon be able to buy this from Saygus.com. It’s one of those handsets that’ll please a certain consumer base, and I’m definitely included in that. Despite my efforts, I still tend to carry around my content on my phone and never find time to upload it. I just want to come in the house from a day out at the park or whatever and say, “Hey, look at what we did today” and stream it to the TV without any faffing about. I also like the fact that it can become my gaming device – effectively like a slimmed down Nintendo 3DS – by pushing out delay-free video to the big-screen TV.
They’re currently taking orders for this device, which is also available in white and pink if you fancy, for $599 (around £390). However, it is not available to be shipped yet. They’re going to let us know a shipping date in the coming weeks.
