A Polestar Phone now inexplicably exists

Polestar, the Volvo EV subsidiary, has made a smartphone. It’s called, predictably, the Polestar Phone, and it’s only available in China. There are many smartphones from car brands (often they are Lamborghini), but these are usually licensing agreements that the car manufacturer ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, however, which makes it a bit more complex than a car brand’s usual licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on polestar.cn, which has four main elements: “Polestar 2”, “Polestar 3”, “Polestar 4” and now “Polestar Phone”.

Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Perhaps all this work on the Android Automotive operating system has made Polestar engineers really excited about developing Android devices. The website, thanks to machine translation, promises that the phone was “jointly designed by Polestar’s global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with gold details Swedish who symbolize high performance”. “Decorated” is probably the best way to describe Polestar’s contributions to this phone, as it appears to be a standard Meizu 21 Pro with Polestar branding. This makes look beautiful, with a minimal rectangular design and an all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone it’s based on.

So, what exactly does the Polestar Phone have to do with a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and feature all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at just 5,050 mAh (or something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery in a vehicle like a Polestar 4. The car is also the size of the phone’s screen , the phone packing a pocket-sized 120Hz frequency. 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED and Polestars all sport large tablet screens.

However, a spec comparison isn’t a clear win for the cars. The sad thing about the state of the automotive infotainment market is that the computer in this roughly $1,000 (7,388 yuan) phone is considerably faster than the one powering any system infotainment of Polestar vehicles from $50,000 to $75,000. The Polestar phone comes with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. This is a 2023 flagship mobile SoC built on a 4nm process. All Polestar cars in the Google Play Developer Console (which lists every Android device in the world) are built around an Intel Atom A3960 SoC. This is an absolutely old and low-end x86 14nm desktop processor, released around 2016. This chip was bad eight years ago when it was released, but it’s still available today. The cars all have 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and the Polestar 2 I reviewed had 128GB of storage, which is a clear win for the phone’s spec sheet.

The Polestar Phone and the Polestar Car (more precisely the Polestar 4) will talk to each other. Polestar promises that one day the phone will support Android’s digital car key functionality, but not at launch. The Polestar UI on the Polestar Phone promises a rich app icon design (that) is consistent with the car’s Polestar operating system. Something called “Polestar Link” apparently lets you see multiple pages of the phone’s home screen on the screen of the car’s large tablet, and it looks like maybe apps will float between the two devices? It’s hard to know too many details because 1) there just aren’t many details released yet, and 2) the details that do exist are all in Chinese.

This phone may be sold outside of China. Like Cars, it’s on the Google Play Developer Console, and since there’s no Google Play in China, registering the phone with Google suggests a plan for international sales.

Listing image by Polestar