Frank is a new smartphone coming out whose entire concept is built on the fact that it’s one of the cheapest ways to get a fairly decent device, with specs that will satisfy most users and a respectably low $180 price point. The phone will be launching on Kickstarter soon, according to a Twitter account linked to the entity making the device, and for their $180, backers can expect a 5.5-inch screen set at a 1920 x 1080 resolution, under which they’ll find an unnamed octa-core processor running at 1.5GHz, which could be any number of mid-range processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 617. A fairly impressive 4GB of RAM is on board for the price, along with 64GB of internal storage, and a 3,000mAh battery to power the whole package.
For the price, the phone also boasts a few nice value-added features, such as a fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, and fairly good cameras; the front unit is a 5-megapixel sensor, while the camera on the back is a 13-megapixel sensor. The whole show runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) for now, but upgrades to Nougat and Android O are fairly likely in the future, given the fact that the phone has yet to be released and Android O’s fourth developer preview is already out in the wild. As with many Kickstarter campaigns, the price is lower for early adopters. Only the first 500 units of the Frank phone will be sold at the low $180 price point, but there has thus far been no word on exactly how much it will be after that.
The story of the Frank phone is actually a pretty simple one. Moe Omer, the leader of the effort behind the phone, wanted to get a new phone. He was more than a little put off by the $1,000-plus price tags of some higher-end devices, since he would be doing mostly the same things with them that he would be doing with any other phone, so rather than settle for an older or budget model, he decided to get together with some of his friends and make his own budget phone. The goal was to pack enough specs for a decent user experience doing almost anything into the cheapest phone possible, and if all goes well, it seems that goal will have been achieved. For the specs on offer, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better deal, even among import devices.
