Red quits the smartphone business after a single, terrible phone

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  The Red phone. It's scary-looking.

Red, the high-end cinema camera company, started teasing the world with its first smartphone in 2017. The Red "Hydrogen One" was a gigantic, $1300 slab of a smartphone, with an aluminum or titanium body, ribbed hand grips on the sides, a "holographic" 3D display, and a modular system that, one day, promised to put an actual Red camera module on your Red smartphone. Red said the phone would "shatter the mold of conventional thinking," calling it a "holographic media machine in your pocket."

Red, it turns out, was all talk.

After the release of a single phone and zero camera modules, Red's smartphone division is now dead. The company's founder, Jim Jannard, announced the death of the project—and his retirement—on the Hydrogen forums. Jannard simply writes, "I will be shutting down the HYDROGEN project" without offering any other thoughts on his foray into the smartphone market.

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