At the begiinning of this year, ZTE has launched a Kickstarter campaign for is Project CSX. Just to recap, Project CSX is a smartphone by the Chinese manufacturer which is dubbed as the Hawkeye, due to its cutting edge eye tracking technology which allows for users to scroll with their eyes, hands free. The ZTE Hawkeye will also come with an optional self adhesive case, enabling users to mount the phone on vertical surfaces.
One would expect such a phone to feature overally high end specs, but that isn’t case with the ZTE Hawkeye, and ZTE has acknowledged their mistake on that part. According to a post by a company representative on ZTE’s Z-Community forum, ZTE has admitted that it was wrong in turning the Hawkeye handset into a mid ranger instead of a high end flagship device. The Hawkeye sports a Snapdragon 625 processor. The company has claimed that in doing so, the phone might not have met the expectations of its backers on Kickstarter.
ZTE went with mid range internals for the Hawkeye so that the handset will be affordable to its backers and future consumers at a modest introductory price of $199 (RM883.16). That is no doubt an attractive price for a phone with cool eye tracking tech, but backers might throw in more money if the Hawkeye happens to have flagship specs at a more premium price point. The forum post has also highlighted the company’s dilemma now due to the fact that the price has already been set for the ZTE Hawkeye, and 184 people have backed the project at the time of writing. ZTE is calling for help for its dilemma:
“If you had to choose one or two things to improve the specs of the Hawkeye phone to make it more attractive, what would it be? Before you answer that question, remember that asking for every potential flagship feature is cost prohibitive now that price is set, so let’s try to focus truly on the things that all of you care the most about. Thank you once again for your time and energy to help this project succeed.”
It certainly looks like ZTE is in a pretty difficult situation right now. Perhaps, it is still not too late to call off Project CSX? What do you think can be improved in the ZTE Hawkeye while maintaining its affordable price tag?
Source: ZTE
