ZTE Admits Kickstarter isn’t the Place to Sell Project CSX/Hawkeye

Late last year, ZTE decided they wanted to sell a smartphone with ideas which were crowdsourced from the community. This device was given the name Project CSX and with it they wanted the community to decide everything that went into the phone.

The main rules when launching this project were it needing to be a mobile product, it needed to be affordable, and it need to be technically possible for a launch in 2017. Naturally, this turned into a project for a smartphone and the community was given 5 different features to vote on.

As fans of stock Android, many of us here at XDA wanted this option to win out when we wrote about it in October of last year. The other choices here were eye-tracking and self-adhesion, a glove accessory that would be powered by Android, intelligent cases for phones like a gamepad, stylus or e-ink flip cover and lastly a VR-interactive diving mask. Many of these were way out of the left field and would obviously take years for a company to perfect before bringing it to market.

So the idea of a phone with eye-tracking and self-adhesion eventually won out (don’t ask us how) and this is how we ended up with the phone that would soon be named Hawkeye. It was less than two weeks ago when they launched their Kickstarter campaign for they ZTE Hawkeye, and we learned what type of hardware they chose for the device. Many were upset that after such a long buildup, they ended up choosing the Snapdragon 625 SoC for the device.

In a new interview with Android Central, ZTE’s Vice President of Technology Partnerships and Planning for ZTE North America admits they should have approached this idea differently. Jeff Yee believes they would have been more granular with the idea and asked the community if they wanted the Snapdragon 835 or the 625, then asked if they wanted the fingerprint scanner on the front or the back. The Kickstarter campaign has raised less than $40,000 (out of the $500,000 they asked for), and tells us they are considering cancelling the project altogether.

Mr Yee says if they do end up cancelling it, we could see the eye-tracking and self-adhesion feature appear in a future ZTE flagship (please, please don’t ruin the Axon line with this).

Source: Android Central

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