For years there have been rumors of cars being manufactured by smartphone makers. Just recently, Apple reportedly canceled the Apple Car project, and Google never really made a car but their self-driving Waymo cars are made by Alphabet. Now the tables have turned with EV car manufacturer Polestar revealing a new smartphone.
As reported by Android Police, Polestar unveiled the first images of what is simply known as the Polestar phone. No specs or features were detailed by the company, but they’re expected to debut the phone next week.
We have to admit, the revealed images show off a pretty slick looking device. The bezels appear to be super-thin, which are supposedly 2.2mm thick. The phone also appears to have a 21:9 aspect ratio, which leads us to believe the screen will sit around 6.5 inches.
Based on the images, it looks like there are four cameras on the back, a singular cut out on the display for a front-facing camera, and two physical buttons on its right side.
For those who don’t know, Polestar is a car company that started as Flash Engineering, a Swedish racing team in 1996. It rebranded and later became Polestar Racing and started modified Volvos for racing. Volvo officially bought Polestar in 2015. Two years later, it became a standalone brand and started focusing on electric vehicles, releasing the Polestar 1 in October 2017.
The Polestar 4 is expected to release later this year, which we got an early sneak peak at the New York Auto Show.
Polestar as a company has gone through some changes this year. Volvo divested most of their stake in the company, which let the Chinese company, Geely, take over primary control of Polestar. Geely also owns the smartphone brand Meizu, a smartphone company that has been making Android phones since 2011.
It appears that Polestar and Meizu are teaming up to design the Polestar phone. Polestar's CEO, Thomas Ingenlath, told CNBC in an interview that the goal of the Polestar isn’t phone to take on Apple, Google or Oppo.
Ingenlath said that the focus is on an “opportunity to link these two worlds together” that he says is not possible with current technology.
The Polestar phone is expected to run on a customized version of Meizu’s FlyMe OS. It was based on earlier versions of Android, and from Ingenlath’s interview, it seems that it's making a custom OS. Meizu is also building a custom OS for the Polestar vehicle, which currently runs on Android Auto.
There are other Chinese manufacturers making cars and phones to create an integrated ecosystem, it’ll be interesting to see if these attempts find success.
