A few years ago, Turing unveiled the liquid metal Turing Phone with lots of promises that did not follow through – asking for money upfront, Turing took 2,000 orders and only launched 900 after a lot of complaints and demands for refunds, all of which were riddled with build quality issues and overall poor performance. After that, Turing left other two phone projects hanging, the Appassionato and Cadenza, after the contract with a manufacturing partner was terminated.
Recently, Turing announced the HubblePhone instead of just forgetting all about smartphones, setting what it looks like another unreachable goal for themselves. Because honestly, the phone does not look like anything anyone has seen before.
The phone is a device that promises to offer multiple viewpoints and that’s not even the cherry on the cake: the Emotional Machine Intelligence (EMI) is. It supposedly is a chip that can process human emotions and then turn them into machine emotions by using wave computing. To make it more clear, the phone will use the camera to read the user’s facial expressions and transcribe them into machine intelligence and this feature would feedback the user’s emotions for example, onto an AI character in a game, which would make it seem almost like interacting with a sentient person within the game.
In addition (what, you thought we were done?), the phone will have AR and VR capabilities, and the company aims to blend machine intelligence and AR.
Yes. Ok. Moving on, the HubblePhone will also hold two Snapdragon 855 chipsets, which are expected to debut sometime at the end of this year. The phone is set to be released in 2020 and will cost around $2749, in case you wanted to start saving up.
Turing CEO Syl Chao insists that now, since they are working with Foxconn, they have learned from the previous mistakes and will leave the assembling to the experts. Somehow the design has come out as feasible for the experts in question.
I’ll be the one to say it then – the company’s claims have done nothing so far but bring about a few laughs and some head shaking. At least this time they are not taking advantage of the users by asking them money upfront, but will be using venture capital instead, via crypto tokens.
Somehow for Turing, delivering those 900 phones out of the 2,000 that were promised, much later than discussed, seems to count as a success. With that in mind, I have to say I don’t have a lot of faith in a company who regards doing the bare minimum towards 2,000 paying users as an accomplishment.
Even so, this is most likely Turing’s last chance to prove themselves and, instead of taking it easy, they have made it a whole lot harder for themselves by setting what seems like unattainable goals.
Nonetheless, if they do, somehow by some miracle, pull the HubblePhone off at all, they will both redeem themselves as well as change the phone industry altogether.
Follow TechTheLead on Google News to get the news first.
