Sirin Labs discontinues the $16,000 Solarin Smartphone & lays off a third of it’s Employees

You are reading a story from PhoneRadar.

Sirin Labs first announced the Solarin smartphone last year in the month of May. You possibly could not have missed the launch of this particular smartphone since it was nothing less than an award show with a ton of Hollywood celebrities in attendance like Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. Yes, it was a huge deal back then. And yes, that’s not the only surprising fact about the launch, even the price of this device was out of the part at whopping $16,000. Why so much money? Well, the company dubbed this as one of the most secure smartphones that you can buy in the market. So bought it? Apparently, no one.

According to the new reports which we have, the company behind this insanely priced smartphone, Sirin Labs has decided to end the production. And not just that, the company has even laid off a third of its workforce i.e., they laid off 30 off the total 90 employees they had. If you are still wondering as to why this happened then you probably need to the basics right as it is not so difficult to figure that there were not people who were ready to pay such a high price for an Android smartphone. Yes, security is definitely important, but apparently, it wasn’t the priority for even richest of the people.

The Solarin smartphone was already obsolete at the time of its launch. It had a Snapdragon 810 SoC and was running Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box. The unique selling point of the product as mentioned earlier is the secure mode where only the encrypted calls and messages were allowed. This is a feature which you can get on some other phones as well and that too without paying a premium like this. As a matter of fact, charging a bomb for this smartphone was not the issue. If you consider smartphones from brands like Vertu, etc. they are also expensive ones, but people do purchase those. Hence it all comes down to what users want. And in this case, people decided to pay for premium stylish looking devices.

The Solarin was not a bad product, but it was just horribly priced, and hence it didn’t reach out to the target audience. Now talking about the company, Sirin Labs will continue to produce the device for at least a year, and at the same time, it will also support its existing users (that’s what they claim). However, for future, they have decided to take a different direction, and it will be interesting to see what we get there. With that said, be sure to stay tuned to PhoneRadar for more info on this.

This story appeared first on PhoneRadar. Join the PhoneRadar Forums to discuss, meet experts & share your experiences. We have now launched a Hindi Website for the latest news in Hindi. Click here to read PhoneRadar Hindi