Good on ZTE for managing to squeeze some press at every turn for its Project CSX offering. At the very least, the whole undertaking has been one of the more interesting approaches a major smartphone maker has taken over the past year, appealing to the internet hive mind for ideas every step along the way.
I’ll admit I expressed a bit of disappointment the last go round, when the company finally unveiled the winner – a sticky-backed handset with built-in eye-tracking. Sure, it’s not exactly par for the course for the fourth-ranked smartphone maker in the US, but I likely wasn’t the only one rooting for something exceptionally weird out of the project – like the piano playing robot hand or VR diving mask.
But the people spoke. And now they’ve helped pick a name – one that will either evoke a sharpshooting superhero or a wise-cracking army surgeon, depending on your age range/level of geekdom.
The name Hawkeye apparently won out over 540 name submissions from interested parties, a moniker it carries with it as it hits Kickstarter today, with a typically low ZTE asking price of $199 (a crowdfunding discount off the final market price, mind).
The final version of the phone is set to start shipping in Q3 of this year – all said a pretty ambitious timeline for such a project.