The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge costs less than $800. The new Solarin Android smartphone costs £9,500, which is about $14,000.
The team behind Solarin, Sirin Labs, announced the details on its super-expensive smartphone Tuesday, which the company said is designed for international businesspeople who want to keep sensitive information private. According to the company's press release, the phone uses the same communication encryption technology as the military.
That kind of security is enticing to some people, but $14,000 goes farther than encryption. Inside the Solarin is a base storage of 128GB, 4GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 810 2GHz eight-core processor. It also boasts five antennas and 24 LTE bands, reaching data speeds of up to 4.6 Gbps.
That all sounds pretty impressive, but it pretty much matches the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge's hardware specs. The S7 Edge actually has a better processor, the Snapdragon 820, although it comes up short on storage with only 32GB.
Not only that, Solarin is a 5.5-inch phone but weighs more than half a pound. That's pretty heavy.
Besides the built-in encryption, the difference-makers of Solarin are on the back. There's a 23.8-megapixel camera and fingerprint sensor surrounded by Italian leather, as well as a special security switch you can press to ensure maximum security during phone calls or while sending messages.
The phone clearly isn't made for the average person, Italian leather or not. For a smartphone that wouldn't perform much better than most new phones on the market, the $14,000 price tag hardly seem justifiable for those of us who are lacking super-cool secrets. But for people with high-value information on their smartphones, that high price could look pretty enticing compared to having valuable information stolen.
Whether or not the phone will succeed is questionable, because how many people have this kind of high-value information that they're willing to shell out that much money for? At least some people think it will succeed, given that Sirin Labs got $72 million in seed funding from a few people last year, including Moshe Hogeg, founder of the bafflingly limited messaging app Yo.
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