After a year of planning and development, former president of the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) Fahd Alhattab is launching a Kickstarter on Sept. 5 to raise money for his latest project, a smartphone called “frank.”
Plans for frank. began when Mohammed Omer, co-founder and chief technology officer of frank. technologies, was in Grade 9 and started drawing up ideas for an inexpensive smartphone that “not only worked well, but looked and felt more expensive than it actually was,” Omer said.
“I’m a huge tech geek and I’m a huge design nerd, so I always found that in Androids there were options that were somewhat similar, in the sense that you could find phones that were cheap that weren’t bad. But none of them were designed well and I feel like that’s a huge part of buying a phone,” Omer said.
Omer, who recently graduated from the Glebe Collegiate Institute, said he initially thought the idea wouldn’t take off. That changed last summer, when he struggled to raise almost $1,000 to buy a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
“It’s personal experiences that help you develop a push you need to start a lot of the stuff you want to do. That was probably the tipping point for me, just because once it becomes personal, you feel like it’s a responsibility,” he said.
Omer approached Alhattab, whom he met through CUSA’s Hatch Entrepreneurship Centre, to help bring the product to life.
“Could we build a phone with high quality specs at the lowest price? That’s what we set out to do,” Alhattab, who serves as the CEO of frank., said.
After working closely with quality assurance engineers and negotiating with manufacturers in China, frank. went through four different models and prototypes before finally settling on one, according to Alhattab.
Some of the features for the final frank. phone include a 5.5-inch screen, 64 gigabytes of internal storage, a five-megapixel front camera and a 13-megapixel rear camera, all running on Android 6.0.
Alhattab said the first 500 units would be sold online at an early-bird price of $180 US. The following units will be sold for $215-$240. The phone will be unlocked for customers, but only supports frequency bands and networks within North America.
“For that price, the specs you’re getting are amazing,” Alhattab said.
Alhattab said he hopes that frank. makes customers question the loyalties they have formajor phone producers.
“[Smartphone companies] need to lower their prices. They need to give us honest phones that aren’t gouging our pockets,” he said.
With the main target audience being “millennials with older phones who are price-conscious,” Alhattab said that he’s pleased with the reaction that the phone has been receiving.
“We have close to 5,000 subscribers online that have subscribed through our website, through our contests, who have shown interest in wanting to purchase our phone or win our phone,” he said.
Alhattab said he is confident that the company will exceed their Kickstarter goal of selling 1,500 phones. He added that if the Kickstarter goal is not met before the campaign closes after 30-45 days, all money will be refunded.
“I’m very pleased with where we’re going . . . We’re going to be able to shake things up and hopefully blow our targets out of the water,” he said.
Photos by Meagan Casalino
