How High is the Web3 Concentration of Jambo Phone?
Summary:
On January 11th of this year, Jambo announced the launch of the blockchain phone Jambo Phone. Initially, this hardware device did not generate much attention. However, on February 15th, a month later, another announcement changed everything. Jambo announced a collaboration with the Aptos Foundation to “sell” this phone, priced at $99, which was “gold-plated” on the spot.
Although the first generation of Solana Saga was awarded the worst phone of 2023, the airdrop value it brought far exceeded the price of the phone itself. This phone sold out immediately and became a recognized “gold shovel.” Solana Mobile 2nd generation, relying on this kind of speculative operation, sold over 60,000 units in just three weeks, even though it is priced at $450 and won’t be in production until 2025. In comparison, the Jambo phone, priced at only $99 and already available for shipping, is simply “dirt cheap”…ummm…right?
As background information, Jambo is headquartered in Congo and its core product is a Web3 portal focusing on “Learn & Play & Earn.” In 2022, it completed a seed round of $7.5 million and a Series A financing of $30 million, with top institutions such as Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Pantera Capital as investors. Although Aptos has performed slightly weaker than its “direct competitor” Sui in terms of currency price over the past six months, its TVL and currency price have shown a significant catching-up trend in the past month. The timing of the acceleration is similar to the timing of the cooperation between the two, which is quite delicate.
Here, I will skip 200 words of the purchasing process (I believe that after you finish reading, you may not care about this part). Snap, the phone is in hand. Let’s briefly unpack it and answer some questions about the phone’s configuration.
Even though the phone doesn’t turn on, the texture is not particularly poor, although the inconsistency between the SIM card slot coloring and the middle frame, as well as the large gap caused by workmanship, can remind you at any time that this phone should only be priced at around $100, or more accurately, at a price not exceeding $500. If you have prepared for this mentally in advance, the thick chin on the front should be more acceptable.
In addition to the body of the phone, the packaging box also includes an airbag silicone case that can be inflated, a 5V2A plastic charger, and a cable that doesn’t look or feel good in terms of quality. It is commendable that there is a phone case, as it is difficult to find a case for this niche model without direct distribution. My Saga is still naked to this day.
There is nothing special to say about the system itself. It is a pure native Android 13 system with few pre-installed apps. It looks like a Web3 phone, and at least it has the Petra wallet. However, I will explain the “however” later.
Because the official promotional materials do not provide detailed hardware configuration details of this device, I checked the specific configuration. It uses a T606 processor from Purple Light Zhanrui, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of ROM. If you have no concept of T606, simply put, it is a level similar to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625, which was released in 2016. In 2016, Bitcoin was worth around $400, and Ethereum finally broke through $1 in January of that year…
Speaking of the T606 chip, it has two A75 big cores and six A55 small cores among the eight cores. The A75 big core was already considered a small core level on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 690, a mid-low-end chip released in 2020. Using a performance level that was barely acceptable eight years ago and applying it to the present, it is self-evident how disastrous it is. After all, in that year, WeChat had just become popular. Now, take a look at how much space WeChat occupies on your phone. 10GB? 30GB?
For specific data, the AnTuTu score is 240,000 (the current flagship Android devices have scores exceeding 2.1 million), Geekbench6 single-core score is 381, multi-core score is 1357, 3DMark Wild Life score is 420, and the average frame rate is 2.52. It mainly emphasizes the benchmark score, nothing more. As a comparison, the Redmi Note 12, priced at 800 yuan last year, uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4Gen1, a low-end processor, with Geekbench6 single-core score of 844 and multi-core score of 2087. You can calculate the difference yourself, and as for the gap with flagship phones, it’s a bit cruel, so I won’t mention it.
The screen is a 6.52-inch 1600*720 IPS screen that can be “lit up.” The refresh rate is 60Hz, the colors are dull, and the pixel density is 269 PPI. The memory is LPDDR4x dual-channel. It has dual rear cameras, with a main camera of 13 million pixels and a secondary camera of 300,000 pixels, which is a standard auxiliary lens. I didn’t check the specific sensor used, but it is sufficient for scanning codes. Don’t expect too much. Therefore, I won’t provide any sample shots here.
The battery capacity is 4,900mAh, and the endurance is relatively practical. After using the phone for a whole day, including testing and leaving it idle, it only dropped by a little over 20% battery. Even my Red Magic 9 Pro, which has an insanely large battery, has never given me this kind of feeling. It seems that as long as the phone is bad enough that you don’t want to touch it, the endurance can be improved several times (not really).
So far, I have covered the hardware part. During the unboxing process, I happened to come across the AGM Z1, a public model product launched last year. This phone is similar to the Jambo Phone in many aspects, such as the processor and mold. However, the memory combination is 8+128, the screen supports a 90Hz high refresh rate, the main camera is 50 million pixels, and it supports side fingerprint unlocking. Jambo Phone lacks all of these features, and the price of the AGM Z1 is 599 yuan…
Enough has been said about the “phone” part of this phone. Now, let’s talk about Web3, or more specifically, the “concentration” of Aptos. How high is it?
In conclusion, regardless of your expectations, you may be disappointed.
First of all, the pre-installed applications on the phone are limited to just the Petra Wallet. This version is the regular Google Play version without any customization. In addition, the phone does not have any DApp application market. It only has the native Google Play.
After logging in and creating or importing the Aptos wallet for the first time, there are no “certificates” sent to the wallet. In simple terms, even if you log into your wallet on this device, it will not generate any identifiable on-chain traces. This is extremely fatal for the so-called “airdrop expectations” because if you have any ordinary Android phone, you can download the exact same Petra wallet application. Everything that Jambo Phone can do, you can do too.
As for Jambo’s “Web3 super application,” the wallet initialization in the built-in application version of this phone has always had problems. I have seen more than one person provide feedback on similar issues on the X platform, and the official has not responded to this issue yet. In the limited testable features, this version of Jambo’s application has no customized components and is completely identical to the regular Jambo mobile application.
The tasks built into Jambo are mainly software downloads and actions that are very Web2, such as following or liking on social media. The method of task verification is still submitting screenshots…
The situation of other built-in applications is not optimistic. There are basically two situations: 1. They cannot be opened; 2. They have nothing to do with Web3. Even for those that can be used normally, there are no customized components. For example, there is a small fox wallet.
By comparison, Solana Saga sends SBT NFT to the bound Solana wallet address when the device is activated, and this is the most important on-chain certificate for subsequent airdrops. In addition, the phone is embedded with a customized DApp application market and directly integrated with the system-level seed library. The wallet also realizes a system-level interactive experience. SBT NFT holders can directly be used as airdrop judging conditions. Furthermore, the customized DApp application market means that Saga users can download custom applications developed by projects. The airdrops of Bonk and Chonky are distributed through this method.
To put it simply, at this point in time, in this system version, Jambo Phone does not show any “airdrop potential.”
The only possibility is to hope that in future major system updates, Jambo and Aptos teams can truly make some customization applications. However, whether this hope can come true is a huge question mark.
Solana Mobile Saga is not the first Web3 concept phone, but the previous Web3 phones launched by HTC and Vertu were not successful. It is only because of Solana’s outstanding performance in the past six months and the innovation in the “game design” of Solana Mobile that Saga has reached a height far beyond the hardware value of the phone.
But this seemingly not too complicated and copyable thing, Jambo has proven with practical actions that not everyone can do it well. I believe we will see more so-called Web3 phones in the future, and whether these devices can become gold shovels and obtain the premium added value of Web3 is clearly not an absolute “YES.”
Finally, let’s hope that Jambo and the Aptos Foundation can provide more empowerment in the future updates of Jambo Phone, otherwise, this terrible phone can only be placed on the shelf as a “warning bell.”
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