Original Title: "99 Dollar Gold Shovel? Be Sure to Read This Article Before Ordering Jambo Phone｜Jambo Phone Comprehensive Review"

Written by: Yobo, Foresight News

On January 11 this year, Jambo officially announced the launch of the blockchain phone Jambo Phone. At the beginning, this hardware device did not create much of a stir, but a month later, on February 15, another piece of news changed everything. Jambo announced a "co-sale" of this phone with the Aptos Foundation, and this $99 phone was "gold-plated on the spot."

Although the Solana Saga generation was "awarded" the worst phone of 2023, the value of the airdrop it brought far exceeded the price of the phone itself. This phone sold out immediately and became a recognized gold shovel. The second generation of Solana Mobile capitalized on this speculative expectation, selling over 60,000 units in just three weeks based solely on a picture with a few letters, without even making a PPT, despite being a futures product priced at $450 that won't be mass-produced until 2025. In contrast, the Jambo, priced at only $99 and already available for shipping, is simply "incredibly cheap"… ummm… right?

To provide some background information, Jambo is headquartered in Congo, and its core product is a Web3 portal focused on "Learn & Play & Earn." In 2022, it completed a $7.5 million seed round and a $30 million Series A funding round, with investors including top institutions like Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Pantera Capital. Although Aptos has performed slightly weaker in terms of coin price compared to its "direct competitor" Sui over the past six months, its TVL and coin price have shown significant momentum in the past month, with the timing of this acceleration coinciding with the announcement of their collaboration, which is quite subtle.

Here, I will skip 200 words of the purchasing process (I believe you won't mind this part being omitted after reading), and voilà, the phone is in hand. Let's unbox it briefly and answer a few questions about the phone's configuration.

What Level of Phone is the Jambo Phone?

The phone feels somewhat plastic when not powered on, but it's not particularly bad. However, the inconsistent coloring of the card slot and the large gaps due to workmanship constantly remind you that this phone should be in the hundred-dollar range, or more accurately, it shouldn't exceed 500 yuan. If you mentally prepare for this in advance, the thick chin on the front shouldn't be too hard to accept.

In addition to the phone itself, the packaging includes a silicone case worth 1.8 yuan with free shipping, a very plastic 5V2A charger, and a cable that looks and feels subpar. It's commendable that a phone case is included; for such niche models, it's too difficult to find a case otherwise. My Saga is still running bare.

The system itself is nothing to write home about, featuring a pure stock Android 13 system with few pre-installed apps, giving it a bit of a Web3 phone vibe, at least it has the Petra wallet. However, this "however" will be elaborated on later.

Since the official promotional materials completely lack details about the hardware configuration of this device, I checked the specific specs: a UNISOC T606 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of ROM. If you're not familiar with the T606, it's roughly on par with the Snapdragon 625, which is a mid-range chip released in 2016. In 2016, Bitcoin was $400, and Ethereum finally broke $1 in January of that year…

To elaborate a bit more on the T606 chip, it has 8 cores consisting of two A75 big cores and six A55 small cores. The A75 big core was already considered a small core level in Qualcomm's mid-range Snapdragon 690 released in 2020. Bringing a performance level that was barely acceptable eight years ago to the present is undoubtedly disastrous. After all, WeChat was just becoming popular back then; now, take a look at how much space WeChat occupies on your phone—10GB? 30GB?

In terms of specific data, the entertainment rabbit benchmark score is 240,000 (currently, flagship Android devices have benchmark scores exceeding 2.1 million), Geekbench 6 scores 381 for single-core and 1357 for multi-core, and 3DMark Wild Life scores 420 with an average frame rate of 2.52. It primarily focuses on scoring, and that's about it. In comparison, last year's Redmi Note 12, priced at 800 yuan and using the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 low-end processor, scored 844 for single-core and 2087 for multi-core on Geekbench 6. You can do the math for the multiples; as for the gap with flagship devices, it's a bit cruel, so I won't disclose that.

The screen is a 6.52-inch 1600*720 "illuminable" IPS display with a 60Hz refresh rate, dull colors, and a pixel density of 269 PPI. The memory is LPDDR4x dual-channel, with a dual rear camera setup: a 13-megapixel main camera and a 300,000-pixel standard filler lens. I didn't check what specific light-sensitive components are used, but it's sufficient for scanning codes, so I won't provide sample photos here.

The battery capacity is 4900 mAh, and the battery life is quite practical. After a day of testing and playing around, it only lost about 20% of its charge. I have never experienced this with my Red Magic 9 Pro, which has an incredibly large battery. It seems that if a phone is bad enough that you don't want to touch it, its battery life can improve several times (just kidding).

By now, I believe I've covered most of the hardware situation. While writing the unboxing, I happened to come across a public model product released last year, the AGM Z1. This phone is similar to the Jambo Phone in many aspects, including the processor and mold, but it has an 8+128 memory combination, supports a 90Hz high refresh rate, has a 50-megapixel main camera, and supports side fingerprint unlocking—features that Jambo lacks. The price of the AGM Z1 is 599 yuan…

Is the Jambo Phone a "Qualified" Web3 Phone?

Having discussed the "phone" aspect of this device, let's get back to the point: how high is the "concentration" of Web3, or Aptos, in this phone?

Here's a conclusion: regardless of your expectations, you may be disappointed.

First, the only Aptos component in the pre-installed apps is the Petra Wallet, and this version is just the standard Google Play version without any customization. Additionally, there is no so-called DApp application market on the phone; it only has the native Google Play.

After logging in and creating or importing an Aptos wallet, no "credentials" are sent to the wallet. Simply put, even if you log into your wallet on this device, it won't generate any identifiable on-chain traces, which is undoubtedly fatal for the so-called "airdrop expectations." Because as long as you have any ordinary Android phone, you can download the identical Petra wallet application, and everything Jambo Phone can do, you can do too.

As for Jambo's "Web3 super application," the wallet initialization in the built-in application version has been problematic. I have seen multiple reports of similar issues on the X platform, and the official response to this problem has yet to be made. In the limited testable features, this version of the Jambo application seems to lack any customization and is identical to the regular Jambo mobile application.

Currently, the tasks built into Jambo are mostly actions like downloading software and social media follows/likes, which are very Web2 in nature. The method for task verification is still submitting screenshots…

The status of other built-in applications is not optimistic either; there are basically two situations: 1. They get stuck and won't open; 2. They are completely unrelated to Web3. Even those that can be used normally lack any customization, like a standard MetaMask wallet.

In comparison, the Solana Saga sends an SBT NFT to the bound Solana wallet address upon device activation, which serves as the most important on-chain credential for subsequent airdrops. Additionally, the phone has a customized DApp application market embedded in the system, along with a seed library at the system level, allowing for a system-level interactive experience with the wallet. SBT NFT holders can directly qualify for airdrops, and the customized DApp application market means Saga users can download project-specific applications developed for them, with airdrops like Bonk and Chonky distributed through this method.

In short, at this point in time and under this system version, there is absolutely no sign of "airdrop potential" for the Jambo Phone.

The only possibility lies in hoping for significant system updates in the future, where the Jambo and Aptos teams can truly create some customized applications. However, whether this hope can materialize is a huge question mark.

Conclusion

The Solana Mobile Saga is not the first Web3 concept phone, but previous Web3 phones launched by HTC and Vertu were not successful. It is only because of the impressive performance of the Solana ecosystem over the past six months and Solana Mobile's innovations in "game design" that Saga has reached a height far exceeding the hardware value of the phone itself.

However, this seemingly not too complicated task that could be copied has been proven by Jambo's actions to not be something everyone can do well. I believe we will see more so-called Web3 phones in the future, but whether these devices can also become gold shovels and whether they can gain a premium in Web3 is clearly not an absolute "YES."

Finally, I hope that Jambo and the Aptos Foundation can provide more empowerment in the future updates of the Jambo Phone; otherwise, this terrible phone will just sit in the cabinet as a "warning bell."