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The Red phone. It's scary-looking.
The high-end camera maker Red jumped into the smartphone market in late 2018 with the launch of the Red Hydrogen One. The $1,300 phone was certainly unique, featuring Red's trademark industrial design, moulded finger grips on the side, a carbon fiber back plate, and either a titanium or aluminum body. The wild design was not enough to create a compelling smartphone package, though, and now Red's outspoken founder, Jim Jannard, has taken to the company's forums to talk about what went wrong. Jannard blamed Red's design and manufacturing partner for the failure of the Hydrogen One, and he made big promises for a forthcoming "Hydrogen Two" phone.
"We chose an ODM in China to prepare the Hydrogen One for manufacture at Foxconn," Jannard wrote. "While Foxconn has been fantastic, our ODM [Original Design Manufacturer], which was responsible for the mechanical packaging of our design including new technologies along with all software integration with the Qualcomm processor, has significantly under-performed. Getting our ODM in China to finish the committed features and fix known issues on the Hydrogen One has proven to be beyond challenging. Impossible actually."
Blaming the ODM for the woes of the Hydrogen One is an interesting strategy. The biggest complaints about the first Red phone weren't that it was shoddily built or designed but that the basic outline of the phone didn't offer any compelling features over a normal smartphone. Red is an ultra-high-end camera company, but none of its camera technology made it into the Hydrogen One, which used an off-the-shelf camera sensor. The phone was supposed to have a modular camera system, but that never shipped. The Red phone had 3D screen technology, but it didn't offer a compelling illusion of a third dimension. What, then, was the point of this bulky, ugly phone with dated hardware?
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