Brax's Open_Slate Smashes Its Crowdfunding Goal — But Launches with a Price Hike

The open_slate, a modular privacy-centric two-in-one tablet from smartphone maker Brax, has opened its crowdfunding campaign — and has already raised nearly a million dollars to produce the device.

"With BraX3, we proved that a privacy-focused mobile device could be designed, crowdfunded, manufactured, and delivered outside the traditional Big Tech ecosystem," Brax co-founder Plamen Todorov claimed when the device was unveiled back in January. "Just as importantly, BraX3 showed us the value of building with the community. The feedback we received — what worked, what didn't, and what people wanted next — played a major role in shaping our direction going forward. Today, we're ready to share the next step in that journey. We're introducing open_slate."

The open_slate takes the company's privacy-centric smartphone concepts and applies them to a larger-format tablet device. Inside is a MediaTek Genio 720 system-on-chip with two high-performance Arm Cortex-A78 cores running at up to 2.6GHz and six lower-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 2GHz, plus a Mali-G57 MC2 graphics processor. Memory and storage depends on the reward tier: the base model has 8GB of RAM and 12GB of storage, while the higher-end model includes 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage — while storage can be expanded via M.2 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), or the slot can be used for an accelerator or other PCI Express (PCIe) device.

As with Brax's previous smartphone designs, the open_slate is built with privacy in mind. It can run BraxOS, a "De-Googled" version of the Android mobile operating system, or a mainstream Linux distribution at the user's choice, and there are "hardware-level" switches to disable the cameras, microphones, Wi-Fi 6E 2×2 and Bluetooth 5.3 radios, and internal sensors. The device is also modular, in part at least: the radio module can be swapped out for a more powerful Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 version launching towards the end of the year, the company claims, and the 8Ah battery behind the device's 12" 2.4k IPS touchscreen display is user-replaceable.

The company's crowdfunding campaign for the open_slate is open on Crowd Supply, and at the time of writing had raised nearly a million dollars — but it launches with some unwelcome news: a price-hike, driven by the rising cost of memory components. What had been a planned $399/$529 price point for "early bird" backers of the 8GB/128GB and 16GB/256GB models respectively has become $469 and $629. All hardware is expected to begin shipping in September this year, pending validation of the engineering samples and product certification — though, as is always the case with crowdfunding campaigns, this is by no means guaranteed.