Comet floating smartphone on IndieGoGo may not hold water

While most smartphones these days lack water proofing, with only a select few like selected models of Sony’s Xperia range having the modest ability to survive for up to 30 minutes in a metre of water, tops, all of them unfortunately will sink like the Titanic and having the ability for your phone to keep working in the drink isn’t going to to much if you can’t recover it should you accidentally drop it in the deep or moving water. This new phone that’s just hit IndieGoGo for funding is not only water resistant, it floats too so that your blower doesn’t go off into the briny depths like a sub and surfaces more like a majestic well, er…whale.

The new floating smartphone, dubbed the Comet comes with a 4.7-inch Full HD AMOLED display, runs stock Android Marshmallow on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 2GHz processor, has 4GB RAM and has dual front and rear 16-MP camera that will feature optical image stabilisation. The built-in battery powering the phone clocks in at 2800mAh. Storage options run into either 32GB or 64GB variants though there’s no word on if there’ll be a microSD card expansion slot or dual SIM card slots.

One particular feature they’re keenly touting is end-to-end 256-bit AES milspec grade encryption so Big Brother or whatever sinister alphabet agency intent on keenly listening in can’t tune in to your nattering on the phone. The caveat here is that this encryption only works if the other side has another Comet phone too.

Prices for both variants run into about US$329 and US399 and according to their timeline it’ll, assuming it’s fully funded of course, be available to backers by April 2016. You can check out the campaign on IndieGoGo here

Further investigation reveals however that they originally started pitched the phone on Kickstarter to disastrous effect earlier in June which you can see here where they only managed to get 144 backers and a somewhat dismal US$25,304 out of a requested US$100,000. On Kickstarter, the phone has much of the same touted specs though with a design that has three fins popping out the back of the phone through some unknown means when it hits the water to get it to float. The jury is out on the Comet and more often than not, these crowdsourcing efforts fail but hey, if you have the cash and are keen on plunking down a few Benjamins for a phone that floats and has completely legitimate specs that would put a phone from any of the major vendors to shame you know where to go.