Is the $500 crypto phone worth it?

It’s been two weeks since the worldwide launch of the Solana Seeker, the successor to the Solana Saga. About 150,000 people have begun receiving their phones in the mail, and their reviews are trickling in.

As a general phone, the Seeker fails to turn heads. It’s measurably slower, and most reviewers say the camera is a far cry from flagship devices like the Samsung S25 Ultra or the iPhone 16 Pro.

As a crypto phone, the jury’s still out. The Seeker is arguably miles ahead of anything else due to its “Seed Vault,” which allows users to securely store their Solana assets.

But there are only a few apps that support this, and the juicy airdrops that turned the Solana Saga into an overnight success are noticeably lacking for the Seeker. This could change next month, though.

So, is the Solana Seeker a good phone? Is it a good crypto phone?

Over the past week, I’ve gathered online reviews and reactions to the Solana Seeker while conducting my own tests to answer that question.

Solana Seeker review: How does it perform as a phone?

Let’s be honest, the Seeker is unlikely to blow the socks off tech reviewers like Marques Brownlee, who called the Solana Saga the “bust of the year” in 2023. 

At the time, Brownlee slammed the phone’s subpar camera, buggy software, inconsistent fingerprint scanner and jaunty price tag. 

“This becomes the perfect embodiment of crypto in 2023, at best, ahead of its time. At worst, completely useless to most everyday people and gives whatever else is going to follow it an even harder uphill battle,” he said at the time.

Two years later, we have the Solana Seeker in our hands. There are parts of it that actually are worse than the Saga on paper, but I didn’t notice this impacting my experience, and there are a few places where the Seeker gets it right.

Its internal storage has shrunk from 512 gigabytes to just 128 GB, memory has gone from 12 GB to just 8 GB of RAM, and its processor — the Mediatek Dimensity 7300 — loses out against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which was used in the older Saga.

This wasn’t a problem in my playtesting, which included a round of battle royale shooter PUBG Mobile and a few chapters of The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, a turn-based strategy game. However, benchmarking tests indicate the phone could have trouble with AAA game graphics. 

On the other hand, the camera, once a pain point for the Solana Saga, has vastly improved, going from a 50MP primary camera to 108MP with optical image stabilization. The selfie camera has also been upgraded from 16MP to 32MP. 

One reviewer, YouTuber Cryptocomix, gave the camera a 1/10, and in another video said, “The camera on this thing is pretty rough, but Androids are always like that.”

Other reviews said the camera is “unlikely to win any awards,” but it was “in line with what you’d expect from a mid-range Android Phone,” while another review called it “good but not spectacular.”

In testing, I found the camera on par or slightly better than my old iPhone 13 Pro, the flagship camera from just three years ago, which is more than adequate unless you’re a phone photography snob. However, the difference in quality is noticeable when I put it next to my friend’s new Samsung phone. 

Battery-wise, the Solana Seeker boasts a decently large capacity battery that can take around two days of moderate use (in my testing).

It’s also cheaper than the Saga at just $500, is smaller and weighs less, while its display has a slightly higher resolution than its predecessor. 

Solana Seeker: Is it at least a good crypto phone? 

This is a complicated one, so I’ll put it this way: The Solana Seeker has all the ingredients to be great — kind of like crypto — but no one’s figured out the killer recipe yet. 

One of these ingredients is the “Seed Vault,” which makes a return from the Saga. 

“Seed Vault” is their catchy name for the hardware wallet built directly into the phone, which can be accessed with user biometrics. Thanks to a “Trusted Execution Environment,” this seed vault is isolated…