ZTE Kills Hawkeye Kickstarter, Delays Phone

ZTE’s crowdsourced phone was too midrange for early adopters, so it’s back to the drawing board.

ZTE CSX Project Hawkeye smartphone

ZTE is killing off the Kickstarter campaign for its “Hawkeye” crowdsourced phone and refunding backers’ money after dissatisfaction with the phone’s midrange specs sent the company back to the drawing board, ZTE technology VP Jeff Yee said today.

Hawkeye is the result of “Project CSX,” an ambitious, yearlong attempt by ZTE to crowdsource ideas for a mobile device. The winning idea was a phone with an adhesive back that could be operated just by looking at it, which ZTE put up on Kickstarter to garner additional support. But the company miscalculated by trying to hit a $199 price point, delivered specs that didn’t attract early adopters and enthusiasts, and only had 190 pre-sales before cancelling the campaign today.

ZTE CSX Project Hawkeye smartphone

The Project Hawkeye prototype shown at CES in January.

“We’ve been listening to the feedback over the last few weeks on what phone platform consumers want for this phone, and they weren’t happy with it being a midrange,” he said.

Hawkeye will still happen, Yee said. But ZTE will take a little while to figure out how to build it on a higher-end, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820- or 835-based platform, and will collect further ideas through its own ZCommunity website rather than through Kickstarter, Yee said. Although the company has lost a few months of development time, ZTE wants Hawkeye to hit shelves in 2017.

“We lost about four months in this project cycle, but we’re trying to follow through in our commitment,” he said. “We still have intentions to do a couple of more things that are going to be a lot of fun.”

Learning as They Go

The Hawkeye setback hasn’t broken Yee’s faith in crowdsourcing. I discussed with him whether crowdsourcing may be giving confusing signals—for instance, prioritizing features desired by a loud minority over a quiet majority—and he said ZTE balances out comment-board opinions with larger polls and its own judgement.

The crowdsourced data approach is also starting to spread to other ZTE products, he said. For instance, the ZTE Axon Mini launched in Canada with stock Android in part because he saw so much enthusiasm for stock Android during the CSX process.

“One of the big things that we heard, and we were shocked that many people wanted it, was stock Android … it just shows we are listening, and some of the ideas from CSX are starting to make their way into phones,” he said.

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