Punkt rocks its minimalist roots with first smartphone
Minimalist phonemaker Punkt has launched its first smartphone, positioned at the crossroads between minimalism, privacy, and utility.
$749
They must have a different understanding of minimalism than I do, lol.
Minimalize your bank account.
Yeah, I was interested in this phone until I saw the price tag.
they also nailed the minimalist vibe better.
Minimalist with a 6.7" screen, eh? Now I really want to know how they define minimal lol. Minimal features? Minimal security? Minimal support?
LMAO
Mainline phones are already minimalist.
I want a swiss army knife phone.
Now I'm imagining a phone with a push-button blade at the side of it. 🙃
Punkt rocks
Punk aint dead!
Sorry about Zed though
Came to say this lol
I don't get the use case. What does it offer over getting an old phone and sticking LineageOS on it?
Or any pixel and putting grapheneos on it.
I think the advantage is that you get to pay $20/mo for some software after the 1st year.
Wtf.
Right. Like, why would anyone pay a subscription for that?
Edit: I think I get it now:
Those who buy the MC02 get a year for free, after which they’ll pay around $20/€15/£13 each month (discounted if paid annually) to access a handful of services, including email, a VPN (dubbed “Digital Nomad”), online synchronization for calendar and contacts, secure storage on Punkt’s own Swiss servers and the express promise that there will be no ads or third-party crawlers.
So you can access cloud services without being tied to Google, I suppose. Still, the value proposition is questionable.
And even that advantage can be minimized by getting any bundle of privacy products, like Proton which offer all of those (Mail, VPN, Drive, Calendar) or even with your self-hosted VPS (Some VPS seller even allow you to prepare it with Nextcloud and a VPN relay for near no extra paiement).
I see the "pay once to one company", but you also need to trust them entirely, for EVERYTHING.
Also, there's already plenty of companies doing such thing (regardless of how practical/private/secure they are)
Might be more secure since it's based on GrapheneOS.
If they didn't mess anything up (security and privacy wise) in their deriviative OS, then I would feel comfortable recommending this to non-tech savvy people who care about their privacy.
Edit: Also with those specs and that battery without Google Play Services, this phone might last me a week on a single charge.
It is based on GrapheneOS which is exactly what the project wants.
GrapheneOS is permissively licensed which means exactly this is possible and wanted. I dont get it, but I guess its realism.
Their hardware is way less secure though, so I will stick with user Pixels and GrapheneOS.
Those specs are just horrendous, why would they put an LCD when they got that pure black theme going on?
One of the screenshots has google play store installed on it, that'll do wonders for privacy.
According to the article, it is installed in a "sandbox". As their OS is based on GrapheneOS, I assume they're using the same solution.
Yeah it should be sandboxed Play if they dont totally mess up
Yeah, no...
Aaah that Apostrophy OS thing.
Sooo: their phone is way less secure than a Google Pixel, their OS is paid but possibly less secure than GrapheneOS as they need to remove features like Memory Tagging that is only available on Pixels.
Hell I dont even know if they have a secure element.
Until we get Sourcecode I wouldnt trust them.
I always get hopeful when I see minimalist because I'm hoping for the return of smaller phones. I wish I was smart enough to recreate the feel rested of the nexus 5x with modern hardware. Without the issues the original had ofc.
If the manufacturer doesn't state the SoC, lag is what you will see!
Nice!