CES 2015: The Saygus V2 smartphone is preposterously powerful

You haven’t heard of Saygus yet, but if its claims are true, it’s a name worth remembering.

On a simple stand tucked away at the back of the South Hall, the Salt Lake City-based company is demoing its first smartphone, the V2 (V squared). Founder Chad Sayers says that his team is composed entirely of smartphone enthusiasts, and that the company makes nothing but this smartphone – and that’s why it couldn’t help but design a device that packs in every last bit of cutting edge tech they could lay their mitts on.

The spec reads like a phone nerd’s wish list, and includes a few bits of neat-sounding technology we haven’t seen before. A 5in, 1080p  ‘ArcticLink III’ sunlight-readable screen. 64GB of built-in storage, and two microSDXC slots, supporting up to 128GB a piece (that’s 320GB of potential storage, folks). A side-mounted fingerprint scanner. A 21MP rear camera and a 13MP front camera, both with optical image stabilisation.

And there’s more. NFC. An IR transmitter for TV control. Harman/Kardon speakers. Built-in wireless Qi charging. Wireless HDMI capability from Silicon Image. Some battery-boosting jiggery-pokery claimed to make the 3100mAh battery perform like a 4600mAh unit. 4G LTE too, of course, but augmented by technology from Fractal Antenna that Chad Sayers claims will add a bar to your mobile reception wherever you are.

Out of the box the V2 runs Android 4.4.4 and will be updated to Lollipop in the near future, but interestingly the device can boot other OSs from microSD too – Sailfish and Linux, for example. 

The only unexceptional feature is the Qualcomm 801 chipset inside, running at 2.5GHz – and even that’s the equivalent of the silicon inside pretty much every phone in our Top 10. Oh, and the screen isn’t 2K, but at 5in the extra pixels would be wasted anyway.

All of the above is housed in a IPX7 waterproof and impressively compact aluminium and magnesium case with a carbon Kevlar bumper around the screen and more carbon round the back. The tiny screen bezel makes it feel like a smaller device than a 5in screen would usually demand. 

We’re told the design is likely to be tweaked, which is no bad thing – a sophisticated, HTC One (M8)-esque beauty this ain’t. The units we saw were rough around the edges and not representative of the finished product, so it wasn’t possible to get an idea of performance. Really, all we have to go on are the claims of the press release – but if they’re true, this is going to be a device to watch very closely indeed.

Saygus is aiming to have devices to market in February and is already taking registrations for pre-orders. Stuff will be the first region outside of the US to test the device – and you’ll be first to know if it lives up to that preposterous specification. We do hope so.

READ MORE: All of Stuff’s CES coverage on one handy page

Will Findlater Contributing Editor

About

Will is a contributing editor and ex-Editor-in-Chief of Stuff. He's been here a while: since 2004, in fact. Things have changed a fair bit since then, although he still gets ribbed for his ongoing respect for 'pioneering' Windows Mobile PDAs. He lives in hope that a new gadget will some day emerge that excites him as much as his Amiga did when he was nine. (The iPhone came pretty close.)