Red is giving away its $1300 phones for free

Professional camera company Red has postponed the release of the titanium variant of its Hydrogen One smartphone. The company could not meet pre-orders in time. In order to make up for it, Red will be giving away the less expensive aluminum variant of its phone for free.

Alas, there’s a catch. Red will only offer the free phones to anyone who had pre-ordered the Titanium version of the phone. The phones were supposed to come out shortly after October 9^th.

As of now, the company isn’t taking any more preorders of the phones.

The delay came because of production issues. CEO of Red Jim Jannard posted in the company’s forum saying Hydrogen One’s Titanium model had not met the release date, because it is so difficult to produce.

Vendors were adamant that they would be able to meet pre-orders but sadly not enough phones were manufactured.

Jannard wrote in a blogpost,” I can’t go over there and make [the phones] myself, or I would. All I can do is do what I think is fair… as if I was the customer (sic).”

“We will send all Ti pre-orders an aluminum hydrogen 1st when we begin shipping them. Additionally, when we finally do make Ti models correctly, we will send that to you at no charge. You are allowed to keep the aluminum as well,” Jannard further wrote.

The titanium version of Hydrogen One will cost $1595, whereas the aluminum model will cost $1295. There isn’t too much of a cost difference when one looks at it in terms of percentages.

Apart from the price, the phones will only differ in their material.

We can safely assume that the aluminum models should come out in October as planned unless like the titanium version, they get delayed as well.

Red hasn’t given any new dates for the release of the Titanium version of Hydrogen One. All the hype surrounding Hydrogen One is because of its top of the line camera and holographic 3D display.

And anyone who is familiar with the company can attest to the unparalleled caliber of Red’s cameras.

Other specs include previous generation Snapdragon 835 chipset processor, a massive 4500mAh battery, microSD support

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Customers had started placing orders 14 months when Red hyped the launch of its first smartphone. What’s even more surprising is that this is a crowd-funded project. For a crowdfunded project to be handing out free hardware is unheard of.

Hydrogen One being a crowdfunded project is extremely disconcerting. Such projects most often either end up facing prolonged delays or releasing an unfinished product to the public.

On paper, this still looks like a pretty sweet deal. You will be getting two phones for the price of one (kinda), oh yeah and you will have to be patient (Just a lil’ bit).

To be honest, this might just be brilliant out of the box marketing by the evil geniuses at Red. This shortfall could be self-generated just to create the media frenzy to disrupt Apple’s and Samsung’s stronghold over the smartphone market.