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.
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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 from the device’s main processor, meaning hackers theoretically can’t get into it.
It is arguably the only crypto-centric part of the device that can’t be copied with software.
“When you approve a transaction, the signing request and approval are facilitated entirely by this secure environment. Your private keys never leave this isolated hardware, and the main operating system never sees them,” explains Emmett Hollyer, Solana Mobile’s general manager.
“This is the same type of secure hardware that protects mobile payments and biometric data in flagship smartphones,” he adds.
From a user perspective, this means they can feel a little safer storing crypto on their devices, and thanks to the Seeker’s thumbprint scanner, they can now execute transactions just through a quick repositioning of their finger.
Closely tied to all of this is the Seeker Genesis Token and Seeker Wallet.
The Seeker Genesis Token is a unique soulbound non-fungible token that is linked to every individual Seeker phone and is claimed once a user sets up their phone for the first time. It’s key to proving you are a Seeker owner and is meant to unlock unique perks and rewards in the future.
This Seeker Genesis Token is also what gives users their own unique Seeker Wallet address, like “Anatoly.skr,” for example. New Seeker owners will be prompted to set this up when they turn on their devices for the first time, and the process is refreshingly quick and easy.
Unfortunately, this is where the new-tech awe suddenly stops.
Solana DApp store, a work in progress
The Solana Seeker is let down by its decentralized app store, known as the “dApp Store” — one of the phone’s big selling points.
Solana Seeker’s app store is marketed like Solana’s version of Google Play or Apple’s App Store. It features apps built on the Solana blockchain and optimized specifically for Solana Mobile users, sans the predatory 30% dev tax.
However, while the Solana DApp store has an impressive 141 apps on offer, spanning trading, NFTs, DePIN and more, many Seeker users notice some apps don’t work, particularly with Google logins.
Many don’t support the Seeker Wallet, forcing users to go through email registration, which feels outdated in comparison.
I analyzed over 110 apps on the Solana DApp store, finding that only around 67 have been updated sometime in 2025, and only 24 of them have been updated this month.
In testing, some apps don’t appear to have any real functionality or are shortcuts to the Brave browser. One app, which claims to pay users with crypto to train AI, returned an error message after I spent 15 minutes arduously tagging a photo to train the AI model, meaning I didn’t earn any rewards.
The Moonwalk Fitness app, which rewards users with crypto for hitting step goals, failed to connect to my fitness tracker and, as of today, is now perpetually stuck in the login screen.
There were, of course, many apps that worked fine. Phantom, a Solana wallet app, has the highest number of reviews on the app store, scoring a robust 4.9 stars. Jupiter Mobile (a DeFi and wallet app) and Marinade Finance (a liquid staking platform app) were reportedly also working well (but didn’t in my testing).
I tried Candy AI, which allows users to create unique AI-generated videos from prompts and mint them as NFTs. It supports the Seeker wallet and was fun and easy to use.
Hollyer says he expects the pace of development to “increase rapidly” now that devices are starting to get into people’s hands.
Hollyer also points to Seeker Season, a program they plan to launch in September, introducing new DApps and experiences weekly.
It comes after a month-long Solana Mobile Hackathon, which brought $100,000 in prizes for projects to build for the Solana Seeker, running from July 1 until August 4.
So, maybe the apps aren’t here yet, but at least you’ll make some cashback with airdrops, right? Well, I have some bad news for you there, too.
Are there Solana Seeker airdrops?
Yes, but not if you just bought it.
If you hope to make a quick buck from airdrops, think again. Solana Seeker is noticeably bare in this department, though this could change quickly.
According to Two Loot, the combined value of airdrops aimed at Solana Seeker holders is about $139.72, but you have to have pre-ordered at least before April 1, 2024, to be eligible for the biggest one (MEW). There have been no new airdrops since the phone was released on August 4.
It’s a big contrast from the Solana Saga days, when each holder could claim 30 million BONK tokens per phone (among other airdrops), worth around $1,400 at its peak price. The Saga went from flagging sales to completely selling out in just a few days.
“Airdrops were definitely part of Saga’s story, but I think that narrative misses the bigger picture, which is that the Solana community discovered the value of being part of an exclusive ecosystem and organically created ways to pursue that,” Hollyer tells Magazine.
Hollyer says that for the Solana Seeker, this concept has been built in with the Seeker Genesis Token and the SKR economy.
The SKR is the new native asset of the Solana Mobile economy, but not much is known about it other than that it will “power economy, incentives and ownership across the ecosystem.”
“SKR will be a critical element of the Solana Mobile economy, and there will be more details forthcoming soon,” Hollyer adds.
Final verdict: Don’t buy it for what it is right now
The Solana Seeker improves from its predecessor but is still measurably worse than today’s flagship phones: It’s slower and buggy, and the camera probably won’t help you win any Pulitzer prizes. Meanwhile, the Seed Vault and companion Seeker Wallet aren’t doing much without app support.
But let’s be real: You’re not in crypto because you’re impressed with what it can do now.
So, if you’re a Solana user with spare cash or looking for a crypto-first phone that can do it all decently well for $500, it’s a no-brainer: You should consider one.
“Right now, we’re focused on getting all 150,000+ devices into people’s hands. We think our users will be very excited with what we’ve got planned,” says Hollyer.
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Source: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/solana-seeker-review-is-the-500-crypto-phone-worth-it/?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound
