Alas! ZTE has officially canceled the Kickstarter campaign for its new smartphone, dubbed as ZTE Hawkeye. All the backers who supported this project will soon get refunded.
Earlier, during CES in January, the company made the Hawkeye official, and available on Kickstarter for crowdfunding. As it turns out, things didn’t went as planned for the company. ZTE set its goal at $500,000 but it managed to get around just a little over $36k.
So, as of today, the Project CSX Hawkeye Kickstarter has been canceled, with all contributing funds being refunded to backers.
While ZTE has canceled the crowdfunding campaign, it still plans to bring the proposed smartphone to life, with improved specs. The company is saying that they will now be working hard on bringing a high-end smartphone device with the eye-tracking technology included. In a statement on its campaign page, the company said:
You requested that the winning Project CSX idea – an eye-tracking, self adhesive phone – be implemented on a higher spec’d device than what we initially proposed through Kickstarter. We’ve heard you loud and clear as we are reevaluating the device features that are implemented in to the device.
Based on your feedback we have determined it is best to push back the date of the release in order to deliver a higher spec’d device. While we are still finalizing the new date, we will continue providing updates and collaborate with the community throughout the entire process.
One of the major reason behind failure of this campaign from ZTE is the extremely modest specifications of the phone. As the company is now suggesting to bring a high-end phone with this new technology, it seems that the company has realized it. There’s no expected launch date for the Hawkeye at this point, but hopefully the manufacturer has more to announce soon.
