Over the weekend, we heard about a new specialized smartphone from a startup called Sirin. This smartphone is said to cost around $20,000, which is quite expensive for a smartphone. But it’s supposedly going to be an ultra-secure smartphone. Which we’ve heard from other companies like Silent Circle and Sikur. This isn’t a crowded space, and is definitely a space that does have a need. Especially with phones being hacked left and right and having tons of vulnerabilities. This phone was said to be featuring the latest specs, touting “tomorrow’s tech”, but that appears to be untrue. If the specs listed in this benchmark listing are anything to go by.
The device recently visited GFXBench to be benchmarked, which is quite common for unannounced devices, as companies want to see how they benchmark. Which you can see the specs down below for this smartphone. It looks like we have a 5.5-inch QHD display here, along with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 powering the device. The Snapdragon 810 is definitely not “tomorrow’s tech” considering it powered most of 2015’s flagship smartphones – and did have quite a few heat issues. A bit surprising that they aren’t going for the Snapdragon 820 or the upcoming Snapdragon 830 chipset. Along with the Snapdragon 810, we have the Adreno 430 GPU. While the processor is definitely last year’s tech, the other specs look pretty respectable. The listing shows 3.6GB of RAM, which likely means 4GB. The discrepancy comes from part of the RAM being allocated for the system. It also shows 101GB of storage, which is likely 128GB. For cameras we have a 22MP rear-facing camera and a 7MP front-facing camera. Both of which are decent sizes, but likely not the actual size. We could be looking at a 22 or 25-megapixel on the back and a 8-megapixel on the front.
What’s interesting here is that the Solarin isn’t running the latest version of Android. Instead we have Android 5.1.1 which is over a year old. Talk about tomorrow’s tech. Now it’s possible that it could be updated to Android 6.0 Marshmallow or even Android N depending on when it gets released. Specs aren’t necessarily bad, but tough to sell this phone based on specs, especially at that price, with old specs.