ZTE recently began a Kickstarter campaign for the Hawkeye, a smartphone with features voted on by the community of ZTE users. However, ZTE has admitted that its device hasn’t met the expectations of many of those users.
ZTE has said that it made a “mistake” with the Hawkeye. Specifically, ZTE made the device a mid-range smartphone, while many in the community were clamoring for a device with flagship-tier specs.
Unfortunately for ZTE, it can’t change the $199 price that it’s asking for the Hawkeye on Kickstarter, which means that it can’t dramatically change the device without losing money on it. Now ZTE has started a community poll to ask what ZTE should focus on to make the Hawkeye better.
As of this writing, there have been 109 votes in ZTE’s poll, and the leader is “Swap the Qualcomm 625 for the 835” with 50 votes. Putting Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 835 processor in the Hawkeye would certainly make it higher-end, but it’d make the phone costlier, too. Other suggestions for improving the Hawkeye include beefing up the 3000mAh battery to 3500mAh, using stock Android with added eye tracking software, adding more RAM, and more.
It’s unclear where ZTE will go from here. The Hawkeye’s Kickstarter campaign is “All or nothing,” which means that it won’t be completed if it doesn’t reach its funding goal. Right now it’s got $35,249 of the $500,000 goal with 26 days, making it unlikely that the goal will be reached. Will ZTE go back and improve the Hawkeye’s specs after the campaign ends? Or will we see this Hawkeye released in its current state, as the affordable Android phone with eye-tracking and an adhesive case? We’ll have to wait and see.
