​Solana launches Web 3.0 smartphone sales in 33 countries

What’s new? Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, has announced the shipping of the Web 3.0-focused smartphone Saga in 33 countries. Users in the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union can already pre-order the device for $1000. The company announced this on Twitter.

Saga will ship to 33 countries at launch.US, Canada, UK, EU, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.If you see your flag, go pre-order 🤝🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇹🇧🇪🇧🇬🇭🇷🇨🇾🇨🇿🇩🇰🇪🇪🇫🇮🇫🇷🇩🇪🇬🇷🇭🇺🇮🇪🇮🇹🇱🇻🇱🇹🇱🇺🇲🇹🇳🇱🇵🇱🇵🇹🇷🇴🇸🇰🇸🇮🇪🇸🇸🇪🇨🇭🇦🇺🇳🇿 — Solana Mobile (@solanamobile) January 19, 2023

What is known about the smartphone? The smartphone is being manufactured by OSOM, an Android development company, whose team has extensive experience building computing hardware for Google, Apple, and Intel. Its functionality is tightly integrated with the Solana blockchain, which secures transactions and allows one to manage cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

The device supports the Solana Mobile Stack toolkit, which allows the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) for mobile phones. Saga features a 6,67-inch OLED display, 12GB RAM, and 512GB storage space. The smartphone is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset.

As the smartphone’s website notes, users will be able to “trade tokens while waiting in line for coffee, mint NFTs on your morning commute, and have instant access to the dApps you love most, anywhere, anytime.”

In response to questions from users about shipping options to other countries, the team said that Saga will not support other regions at launch, but geographic expansion is not ruled out in the future.

In October 2022, British luxury mobile phone company Vertu unveiled a smartphone focused on the Web 3.0 space. It can run its own Ethereum blockchain node and turn photos and videos into NFTs. The smartphone has a feature that switches between Web 2.0 mode — the standard Android operating system — and Web 3.0. Sales started in November on Vertu’s website and in retail stores for $3600 and $41 000, depending on features.