Rectangle phones made of glass and metal are the most common types of smartphones on the market today, but Monahm is now taking pre-orders for its avant garde phone/pocket-watch. Runcible was introduced at Mobile World Congress last year. The circular phone is now available at crowdfunding site Indiegogo starting at $399 and the devices are set to ship in September 2016.
Monohm had originally planned to take pre-orders for the round smartphone about one year ago and then ship the mobile devices at the end of last year.
However, the startup ran into two major problems. The developers wanted to build the device on the FirefoxOS platform. However, the company that manufactured the processor that paired with the open operating system stopped producing the chip that Monohm had chosen, according to Android Authority.
Monohm had to deal with a bigger problem when Mozilla ended FirefoxOS. The company announced that it would stop trying to build a smartphone OS that rivaled iOS and Android, and would instead focus on Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Monohm CEO and co-founder Aubrey Anderson shared that the company had to deal with every possible obstacle, according to The Verge. The company even had more challenges than were usually involved in developing indie hardware.
In fact, co-founder George Arriola left the company but is still an investor. Anderson and chief technical officer Jason Proctor self-funded the company, did a big percentage of the coding, and hired contractors to complete the development of Runcible.
The Monohm team built a new "BuniOS" operating system on top of Android 5.1. Its project is based on Blink. Meanwhile, the web engine was itself based on the open-source foundation that Google's Chrome browser was built on.
Monohm wanted to build a smartphone that looked different than other models on the market. It also wanted people to interact with the device in a new way.
The company hopes people use the "anti-smartphone" less often than other mobile devices. For example, Runcible replaces notifications with summaries, the maps application offers more beautiful travel routes, and the camera features gesture-based controls.
The round phone also relies less on a colossal app ecosystem, which differs from iOS and Android.