We are thrilled to introduce the new HIROH phone powered by Murena with a Hardware Kill Switch!
Simply enable its handy button to physically disconnect the microphone and all cameras. This severs the electronic connection, ensuring hackers have no chance to access your data.
With the HIROH phone powered by Murena you get:
Built-in privacy with /e/OS Hardware Kill Switch created by its inventor Premium quality hardware with a fantastic 1.5k AMOLED display, 108MP rear camera and a 32MP selfie camera, 16GB memory and more… Special numbered Platinum edition of the device for 500 first Murena customers
Ready to use from day one! Because your everyday phone should be your private phone.
Pre-order now exclusively at murena.com and save 200€/$.
I am very pleased to see Murena introduce a new phone today: the Hiroh phone. My question is: who is HIROH and why should we trust then?
The partnership with Fairphone and even Volla and Shift makes sense. To some degree all of these companies have showed an interest in privacy. But who is HIROH? The company’s website says alarmingly little about where they are from and why customers should trust them.
I do worry about Murena when launches like this feel fumbled. It is certainly nice to see new products that might help e\OS gain popularity, but it feels naive to expect customers to automatically trust a company whose YouTube page was set up yesterday and has two followers.
Not so much this. What should a YouTube account have to do with my trust? Every company or brand account there once was a new account set up yesterday. For that matter, every company once was a company set up yesterday.
HIROH have next to no info about themselves on offer on their own website. There’s a name, else there’s nothing. In which countries is this even allowed if you run a business?
This needs explaining when at least PinePhone (to an extent) and Librem 5 had hardware kill switches way before.
Does the inventor now work for HIROH? Were earlier hardware kill switches not kill switches?
What does this mean when the phone runs /e/OS and the last thing you find on the forum regarding this is that Murena was struggling mightily with end-to-end encryption (not to speak of the cloud struggle overall)? Was this resolved by Murena in the meantime, or are HIROH running their own cloud with end-to-end encryption?
For a phone at the advertised price point this is looking really ridiculous right now. But it’s early days and the phone isn’t even there. Improvement is not impossible yet.
On another thought they might be simply sifting for their target group with this approach, and with such doubts we are just not included .
But i never will buy a 1200€ phone (with 200€ discount or not) from an new/unknown brand.
The website contains no contact information (address, country), nor any names (founders, CEO, etc.). You can’t even buy the phone from their website. This does not give me much confidence.
In my online search for information about HIROH, I found nothing, and the same was true for various company registers.
I checked the website, but there is also no information about the company or the person behind HIROH. However, on Virustotal, it indicates that the site is hosted on GitHub.
This is kinda strange because GitHub Pages only allows hosting static websites (frontend only). It is not possible to sell products through the website, as a backend is required for that.
I also found the source code for the website (link). It’s odd that the source code is publicly accessible, especially since they should have enough funds to purchase GitHub Pro, which would keep the code private.
The author of this website, Alex Barangan], works (according to his LinkedIn profile) for a company called Bivy Labs. This company advertises itself with the slogan, “We build sensing and perception hardware for Edge AI.” It’s possible that this company is developing the Hiroh Phone, which would make sense.
In summary, the Hiroh website is hosted on GitHub, where the source code is publicly accessible. The author of this website works for a company that develops technology for other businesses. It’s possible that the Hiroh Phone is being developed by Bivy Labs, but this is not certain. Hopefully, we will receive more information by /e/OS soon
Can the bootloader be unlocked, and way more important, does it support rooting? That would be my first questions before considering it. Because in the next 6-12 months I might be in the market for a new phone.
What I also would consider (very) interesting to know: will the device be sold elsewhere or is it a Murena exclusive? The reason for this question is that I do not use phone covers but always put a skin (wrap). Of course, if the numbers are (way too) low, no manufacturer will produce a skin wrap. Would Murena consider this?
Both should be possible. But will wait for the development team to revert on this. We will be sharing more details on the release and the product in the days to come.
There does not seem to be much known about this company but, duck ai found a bit of information on them and their possible background. Personally, I waited years before buying a Fairphone (from Murena) and my Framework laptop until it was evident that the companies involved had good business models, were successful and would not disappear overnight, leaving me with an unsupported device / unable to buy parts / accessories. Even if I was currently looking to buy a new phone right now, I would buy the latest fairphone and not this one.
We are thrilled to introduce the new HIROH phone powered by Murena with a Hardware Kill Switch!
Built-in privacy with /e/OS
Pre-order now exclusively at murena.com and save 200€/$.
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