A premium smartphone running de-Googled /e/OS, complete with hardware kill switches.
The HIROH Phone (Powered by Murena) is available for pre-sale. You can pay a €/$ 99 deposit to reserve your device and get a voucher to buy it later for €/$ 999, discounted from the retail price of €/$ 1,199.
1,200 moneys is an absurd price for a phone like that IMO. You can get a Fairphone for literally half that. I’m not so sure there is a market for ‘premium privacy phones’ that is not already satisfied by (also significantly cheaper) Pixels with GrapheneOS
What we need is a cheap privacy phone(like €200 levels of cheap) with modern specifications.
Hopefully it sells better than the other phones on the market with hardware switches (e.g. PinePhone).
the phone is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 8300 SoC, paired with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage. These specs place it firmly in flagship territory
That’s not a flagship processor according to MediaTek; it’s in their “premium” category (8000 series) which is one step down from their “flagship” category (9000 series). The RAM and storage seems possible to get on decent midrange/high-end phones in the USD $600-700ish range too. I found the Vivo V60 and OnePlus Nord 4 with similar specs pretty quickly. The Hiroh phone is definitely priced like a flagship though.
Now, I’m not saying flagship specs are really worth it these days (except maybe camera stuff), but this is definitely not a flagship-specced phone.
OnePlus and Vivo benefit from economies of scale. If you’re like me you often end up paying more for less. As stupid as it may sound.
