A while ago a new Smartphone “Made in Germany” was introduced to the Smartphone World, the Linshof i8. The Linshof i8 made quite some waves with Superb Specs and extraordinary design and was supposed to be introduced in early 2015. Now it seems we see an early Out for the Linshof i8 and the end of the german mother company Linshof.

The Linshof i8 was supposed to sport a OctaCore Processor clocked at 2.1 Ghz and 3GB of Ram. Also a 5″ Full HD Super AMOLED display and a 3100mAH battery. Other specs include 16GB internal memory and external memory up to 64GB. Running on Android Lollipop the Linshof i8 was supposed to sell at US$380 (about RM1270).

Back then Dr. Tomas Bencik, the CEO of Linshof said “i8 is everything you need it to be and goes beyond a consumer device. It’s a true business tool. It meets enterprise-grade security requirements and runs smoothly, even while using the most demanding programs.”

We checked the Linshof.com Company Website and now it shows only “Linshof is closed. We understood that it would be a difficult project and we are grateful for having the opportunity to work on it. Unfortunately, our investors decided to close the project due to their own internal reasons. Thank you all for your wonderful support. Note: We have never accepted any kind of pre-orders, donations, or third party investments. All our liabilities and obligations were paid in full.”

That is the text that we find now on the Website. There was an earlier Version of the Text though, with some of the reasons why the Investors stopped the Money Flow.

“We understood that it would be a difficult project and we are grateful for having the opportunity to work on it. Unfortunately, our investors decided to close the project due to challenging political and economic relations between our EU structures and our Russian-based funding support. Our performance tablet was still in the concept phase, however the i8 Smartphone, as a completed and functional prototype, was offered to our partners and may be produced in the future (either as a whole per the original design, or as part of another project).”

While much of the international media and consumers were amazed by the Linshof i8 “made in germany” there were some first signs that the Linshof i8 might not come true. One of our favorite German Tech Blogs Cashy’s Blog Stadt Bremerhaven reported about the i8 and some suspicious data. So had linshof no Impressum, no Tax Number and a hidden WHOIS for the Domain. Also they were using Fake Screenshots for their tablet product teasers on the Website.

Text on the Company Website Linshof.com

Anyways now we can see that the Linshof i8 will clearly not become reality. Which is a shame since those specs combined with german quality and a very affordable price looked like a really good deal to us.

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