First Blockchain Smartphones Appear on the Market: Sirin Labs' Finney Unboxed

After months of expectation and one of the top-five biggest ICOs of 2017, on Nov. 29 Sirin Labs has launched Finney, the 'world's first' blockchain smartphone.

At its launch event in Barcelona, Sirin Labs provided more concrete details as to its wider aims and expectations for Finney, revealing that the smartphone is just the beginning of its plans to bring blockchain technology to mobile devices.

Sirin Labs is aiming with Finney to make cryptocurrency more accessible and popular in a number of other ways.

The company is referring to this program as 'Earn and Learn,' and in conjunction with the outreach-focused concept stores due to open in December in London and Tokyo, it shows how Sirin Labs hopes that the smartphone will serve as a champion for the wider cryptocurrency industry, and not just Sirin Labs itself.

"We have decided to develop the Finney, the first blockchain phone that runs Sirin OS. But this is only the beginning of the execution of our vision. Our vision is that every Android-based device would run Sirin OS. We are hoping for other OEMs to adopt the Sirin OS and join us in the blockchain revolution."

In other words, Sirin Labs doesn't simply want to make blockchain phones, but to produce the platform for cryptocurrency and blockchain applications, becoming a kind of 'crypto Google.

' If it can get a crypto-oriented operating system on, say, a Samsung, Huawei or HTC phone, then it will go a long way in making crypto mainstream, and this is why Erin Brazilay affirmed that Sirin OS is "At least" as important as Finney to Sirin Labs' longer term strategy: "We need to put a lot of pressure on the OEM side, to convince them to adopt Sirin OS as the standard, de-facto technology to enable their phones to be blockchain-enabled."

Not only does Sirin Labs have to contend with the possibility that Finney might appeal only to a "Niche segment" of the market, but it also has more than one competitor in the blockchain-phone sector.

On top of HTC, there's one other manufacturer of a blockchain phone, Pundi X.Back in October, the India-based blockchain payment provider announced its very own "XPhone," a smartphone due in Q2 2019 that can transmit phone calls, texts and mobile data using blockchain nodes, thereby avoiding the need to use centralized mobile networks.

Regardless of such opinions on whether it is a 'true' blockchain phone or not, what is clear is that, with Finney, Sirin Labs has taken an important step for the cryptocurrency industry.