Companies would rarely admit to the public that they made a mistake, let alone adjust a product by asking for public opinion on what they should do. But apparently ZTE is one of those rare ones, and they are asking public opinion regarding their ongoing Kickstarter campaign for the Hawkeye eye-tracking smartphone since it hasn’t been performing as well as expected. The phone itself was a result of a crowd-sourcing campaign, including its Marvel-sounding name.
The concept for the smartphone came from a contest that the Chinese OEM conducted last year, asking people for unusual ideas or features that they would want to have on a smartphone. The result is this unique device which they eventually named Hawkeye (which they also crowd-sourced) which has an adhesive back and eye-tracking technology so you can use it hands-free. The idea is to bring this device at an affordable price so it can reach a wider market.
And so they priced it at $199 when they launched on Kickstarter. However, they have received a pretty lukewarm reception, raising just $30,000 when they’re going for $500,000. The mistake that they admit making is that they thought people would be willing to spend that money on a device with mid-range specs. Well, apparently not. And so now they are looking at bringing better hardware at the same price, since they can’t change it anymore as the campaign is underway.
And since this is basically a crowd-sourced project, they also want to ask people what should the improvement be on the Hawkeye to make it more appealing to people while at the same time not having to add to the price and the manufacturing cost? The options on the poll are:
– Snapdragon 835 chip instead of Snapdragon 625
– 3,500 mAh battery instead of 3,000 mAh
– Use stock Android software
You can also add some suggestions but ZTE reminds people that it should be cost-prohibitive. Let’s see if this can save their Kickstarter campaign.
SOURCE: ZTE
