The IndieGoGo campaign for the F (x) Tec Pro1-X smartphone received over $ 1 million in funding and the first units were shipped to super early bird donors at the end of January. But now the team has run into supply issues.
Specifically, the Snapdragon 835 at the heart of the phone has reached the end of life stage and is no longer available, which means no phone can be built anymore. This affects both the original Pro1 model (more info in a minute) as well as the Pro1-X, which was designed for XDA developers (both are quite similar and use the 835 chipset).
The team chose the Snapdragon 662 as a replacement. It’s a mid-range chipset, so some degradation in performance is expected, although there are actually several advantages to using a newer chip (it was announced in January 2020). There are also some drawbacks, you notice, in addition to the drop in performance.
The F (x) Tec Pro1-X
The 662 should consume less power, thus extending the battery life. And it will run Android 11 out of the box with security updates that will last beyond 2023. The F (x) Tec Pro1-X can also run Ubuntu Touch and Lineage OS, though those ROMs will need to be reworked. .
In addition, the new chip supports higher resolution camera sensors, so the phone will be upgraded to the Sony IMX586 48MP. The original version (with Snapdragon 835) came with a 12MP IMX363 sensor instead.
Connectivity is also improved with support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. The team briefly explained why they didn’t choose a high-end 5G chipset. There are two reasons: 1) the price of these chips, of course, and 2) 5G requires different antennas and the redesign would have taken too long.
The phone’s circuit board assembly is already to be redesigned, so the estimated shipping date has been pushed back from March to August 2021. The pandemic is not helping the situation either.
You can read the announcement on IndieGoGo for more details. As you can imagine, the funders are not happy with the situation.
As for the original Pro1 phone, recent buyers waiting for their device would have received messages that they would receive the Pro1-X instead (that’s not bad at all, the X has over memory – 8/256 GB, compared to 6/128 GB).
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