The Minimal Phone is now shipping (E Ink phone with a QWERTY keyboard) - Liliputing
The Minimal Phone is now shipping (E Ink phone with a QWERTY keyboard)
$400 FFS. All my phones have been cheaper than this.
I've always bought used phones off eBay, won't pay more than $150. There are sellers on there that recycle phones professionally, just like the off-lease PC companies do.
Lemmy: caPitAlIsm!
Well, stop buying new shit. I'd estimate 80% of the things I own were bought used, created by me or found on the side of the road and repurposed/refurbished.
Agreed. You can get a very good Android phone for $400.
https://us.nothing.tech/products/cmf-phone-1
$240.
Can run e/os (basically de googled, more secure android), though its currently in alpha, a bit buggy, if you want more security.
https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-alpha-tetris-14-e-os-for-cmf-phone-1.4692763/
Show one of your phone with an e-ink display and full keyboard.
If they had worked with GrapheneOS to enable their security requirements, I'd be all over this
This is neat, but it suffers the first problem Jobs identified with then-existing smart-phones: keyboard can't be changed for other languages. I'm happy someone made this, but it has a limited reach. I still hope it succeeds.
I feel like using such a phone with regular Android apps doesn't make too much sense. The big advantage of eInk is that it only consumes power if the content changes. But if every letter you type and every second the progress bar of your media player require a refresh of the screen, then you don't really benefit from that feature. Or do I oversee something here?
Since e-ink is monochrome, there are no colours, which can reduce distractions when using the phone (think red notification dot). It also has the advantage of being visible in direct sunlight.
Those actions may not require refreshing the entire display.
E-Ink is viewable in sunlight without a backlight. A huge chunk of power for regular displays is the backlight. Here you only need a backlight in darkness, and it can be quite low.
I get this is a little pricey but it has expandable storage, a physical keyboard, a headphone jack, dual speakers, dual sim card tray, and a promise of 5 years of security updates.
Those bezels suck though. Either make the screen bigger while keeping the device dimensions or make the device more compact.
It's very pricey for what it is.
But I'm sympathetic. It's fairly bespoke, a lot of care clearly went into creating it, and it's not a mass-market item. It'd be impossible to manufacture cheaply.
Overpriced in terms of what the market is willing to pay for a device like this, but likely not in terms of markup over design/manufacturing costs.
E-Ink has big bezel generally, no?
They don't inherently need to, it's just that with e-reader devices like your examples you tend to either have physical buttons on the side and/or want a place to grip the larger device without tapping the screen. There's no reason a phone-sized e-ink device would need the bezels. Most likely there weren't that many screens to choose from and they didn't want to shrink the keyboard down to better match the screen.
I still have a blackberry key2...
Maybe i can switch if it dies....
Qwerty keyboard rocks
MediaTek MT6769
Too bad, Mediatek sucks for custom ROMs. Is it at least performant?
Almost certainly performant enough for an e-ink screen, which will run at a few frames per second at best anyway.
My Kobo Leaf 2 (Android 11) says otherwise, needs at least 2 seconds to load lightweight apps. Modern Android (since 4, Kitkat?) isn't really low-performance friendly.
I wonder how well Android 14 works with an e-ink device; specifically the animations.
I personally think this is a very stylish device, albeit this could be nostalgia on my part.
https://old.reddit.com/r/motorola/comments/10ru0lz/disable_animations_for_a_much_faster_experience/
Disable animations for a much faster experience
Make sure developer options are enabled. If they're not, go to Settings > About phone, then tap on Build number several times to enable it
Go to Settings > Developer options, and scroll down to Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale.
Tap on each of the animation options and turn them off.
I am assuming this has already been configured by the OEM.
But there are other factors as well beyond "cosmetic" animations. For example the UX around search functions in the OS (e.g. in settings) or certain launcher configuration settings. For example, for an e-ink device, I am assuming you would want to disable folder functionality on your home screen, only allowing individual app icons ("opening" a folder with apps would be slow).
I actually like e-ink for some apps. Unfortunately, on my device, dark mode UI doesn't do as good a job as I would like (serious ghosting is a problem even when setting the auto refresh to a much higher rate). I do miss qwerty keyboards but I think I would rather have a device like this with a fold out/slide out keyboard (I would buy a sidekick with android and a larger screen tomorrow if they offered it, and if they offered it with e-ink, I'd still seriously consider it with some reservations).
I've seen devices that have both an e-ink display and an OLED display and I like the idea but the design is often just not what I'm looking for.
But writing and note apps, RSS apps and note taking apps are really really good on e-ink. I have even used Lemmy (boost) on an e-ink device and it's not the greatest experience but I do like it quite a lot. Music and podcasts work so long as you're not using the animations in those apps. And I really like using the web browser, but mostly I think that's down to the way I browse the web.
My main problem is that niche devices like this don't have the same ROM support and configurability that more well known phone brands and models have.
That's cool! I want one.
If this turns out to be good, it would be exactly what I've been waiting for, since...smartphones and e-readers were a thing.
Eh, with full range of Play Services spyware.
I preferred the original design that was more squat and less tall. I was going to get it before they changed it.
