Blloc – minimalist smartphone
blloc.com
blloc.com
- The contrast between the body text and background is to low; it makes it difficult for people with visual impairments to use the website.
- Font size and font weight, the font is too thin and adding this to the low color contrast, it makes it even more difficult to read.
- Images that don't add meaning (textually) to the page, e.g., the logos you use on the "Agile and precise" section. It's a good idea to add `aria-hidden="true"` so they don't "distract" screen readers.
- Also, several images don't have their alt tag, which describes the image to screen readers.
- I can't navigate your website with my keyword.
I don't want to sound like a jerk, but your company builds assistive technology--yes, a phone is an assistive device--so it makes sense that you take care of your primary point of sales, your website, and make it accessible to everybody.
Why are you accusing thinkxl of being a “social justice warrior” and why, exactly do you feel that that undermines your agreement? Is website usability a liberal ideology? Lacking any actual justification your edit feels very out of place on hn.
1. Is it a black & white phone? Or does it use e-Ink (how comfortable is it for the eyes)? (You have mentioned I can enjoy photos with full colour with some "Colour Touch" tech but that's it, there's nothing else regarding it at all). Do you have another website or page where you have discussed your specs in detail?
2. What about battery life? If, assuming, it's not a colour screen then does it have a ridiculously good battery life?
3. Is this phone already a reality or is it just a concept phone or designs as of now and you will be developing it later?
4. What about the privacy and security aspects of this phone?
5. What version of Android is it using, if at all it is using Android? What about updates - any promised/guaranteed date of OS version upgrade?
6. International shipping? International warranty? How do you handle this?
7. Any plans for a smaller phone, something like iPhone SE/5S size (mentioned this as its my current phone)? I mean in ~4 inch ballpark.
That being said, I really hope you succeed, I really want a repairable long term phone in the future. Not sure about what B&W adds to this, but it you offer a chopped down cheaper version (along side your flagship phone), it's far less of a risk to give it a try.
Your website, ironically, breaks at a smaller viewport (at least my small screened firefox on desktop).
I would really consider making this work on tablet / mobile devices, and fixing the accessibility ASAP. Especially considering the product you are trying to sell.
How can I trust your phone hardware if your website doesn't meet modern day standards?
Come on, the website is only text, images, and a few forms, why would you render it in JavaScript. I don't see any additional benefit compared with plain HTML, CSS.
It is not a rich web application, even if it were.
Also, there's been server-side rendering for a while now.
Edit: Opinion
Oh my, the article describes itself.
I stopped reading the article after 10 lines. I'm not easily offended, but when reading an opinion that has the F-word every line, it's just a turn-off.
I won't honor it with my IE (don't feel like giving Stripe a ping).
I really like the display. I've been waiting for a phone with minimalistic display to save battery ever since the Motofone F3.
But there's way too little information there to convince me to pre-order.
I'll show myself out.
It's the same OS, and 99% of people that install Lineage install the GApps otherwise the device is barely usable.
if you're not, you can still use Gapps nano or pico. thats basically just the play store and the service api.
Edit: I see below that it's Android based after all. I still love the way it looks but it's a hard pass. :-(
If you get webOS working on your hardware, you will have a small pile of very staunch supporters.
A couple of realistic caveats, and novel ideas to solve them:
1. webOS is not Android.
Android will eventually mean Fuschia, which will mean bye bye to Linux driver blobs. I'm not sure how the scene looks right now in terms of trying to squash an Android kernel and blobs together with webOS userspace. Might work, might produce rueful laughter.
One interesting thing you could do is lead a community effort to get webOS running on top of Fuschia, which is still very new but functions well enough to fully come up graphically and boot into a Chromium-based session (yep!).
To me, that suggests enough of the Fuschia core is "set" and unlikely to change that RIGHT NOW is the perfect time to quietly catch up to feature parity with alternative userspaces, and when Android does "the big switchover" (it's obvious that's the goal, Fuschia has things like 120fps update targets etc), you'll suddenly have more hardware support than any other platform.
2. webOS has no real apps.
No point denying this is true. Facebook isn't releasing a webOS app. That cements a lot of things. There's also the fact that LG bought webOS for TVs. That did nothing to kill it on phones, but the move certainly did shift all of the tech-prosumer expectancy/focus over to the TV space and leave the webOS-on-phones/tablets sector full of tumbleweeds. And nothing's really changing that.
The webOS-on-Fuschia idea would be unlikely to trigger wholesale adoption of the platform. Not going to do it.
I see a couple of alternatives:
0. You kind of get dual-boot for free anyway
1. Implement hardware-accelerated KVM for ARM on Fuschia, and run Android in a VM
2. Implement kernel-level containerization/virtualization aka what's described under "Virtualization" in http://kernelthread.com/projects/
3. Figure out how Fuschia works at the kernel level and work out how to run the webOS and Android userspaces side by side, either running simultaneously or stopping one to launch the other
(I don't typically start lists at 0, but that first point felt so obvious I used a 0 so I could include it in the list.)
You get 0 for free, and dual booting will appeal to some who want the closure of "Android is simply not running".
1 is... I included that one for comparison :)
2 and 3 seem interesting. I'd tackle these by seeing how the Fuschia team react to being engaged "from the outside". You could lead that effort; I don't think anything is being done in that regard at this point (eg unlike how Chromium does get lots of external contributions from individuals).
Well, that's my 2c anyway.
And the contrast ratio is pretty low too.
Please, don't hire designers who just care about the graphic design aspect and making it look beautiful, but a pain to use, i.e. totally neglect usability.
Erik Spiekermann said it best (enable english captions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0syzCeH4Q
But can you bump up the font size? Being partially sighted means that with the current fontSize of 10px the site is unreadable to me.
Also the specscontainer does not contain all of the 'outline' image of the phone.
There's your minimalist right there.
(Also, what is that, a font for ants?)
When powered off it would just be a completely featureless slab. You could even write the devices logo onto the display before powering it off to do branding without redundancy.
Its a shame that eink hasn't really hit the mobile market yet.
I do think you have a point in that there should be marketspace for what the old Nokia was - something that could stay on all week without babysitting the battery.
Website accessibility is possibly an important part of this, if everyone wrote proper responsive websites that met accessibility standards to look good on mobile then these should read fine on an E-ink display. All text messaging apps should look fine too.
The trick to making the device work is probably the camera, if you could easily connect the screen of another phone to it then you could do selfies and what not. A convenient device to facilitate that, maybe top up the battery of the main phone and work independently of the main phone on a duplicate/tied in SIM, that could work.
There is, besides aliexpress which has a huge selection (including nokia knockoffs) most carriers have a couple super budget non smart phones.
The little information that is on the site about the specs of the phone has massive vaporware smell.
I can imagine they keep backlight down most of the time.
It looks like you're building a pretty generic device with an interesting software stack, so I'd start by making the software shine, and leveraging e.g. LineageOS to get an install base. Once you have feedback from a good swath real users you can look at making a bespoke device based on real-world needs.
For the listed specs, €359 is not a great price point.
As an example, Xiaomi Mi A1 has similar specs and goes for ~ €150.
Do you have any working versions of the phone?
A video of the phone being used?
All pictures look like renders, not real devices.
Not sure who would pre-order something with such little information.
Based on the existing information, this looks to be a phone running on Android. And it'll be preinstalled with Uber and Facebook messenger.
So it's a minimalist phone for people who don't care about privacy? I don't get it.
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I noticed this as well. The images of the device are entirely inconsistent with one another [0].
* Rendering effects are visible in some of the images
* The front is displayed inconsistently. In some renders, a speaker is shown. In others, it is absent.
* The front is shown as having a black bezel at the top in some images and on the bottom in others.
* The radius of the rounded corners fluctuates between top and bottom and from image to image
* On the back, the fingerprint reader, camera lens, and LED may or may not be present from image to image
* Antenna cut outs are depicted as either horizontal or vertical
* The side buttons do not appear congruent
* The information on the back is inconsistent (sometimes device info, sometimes Blloc)
* The camera style fluctuates from image to image (sometimes single lens, sometimes dual lens)
On the flip side, the domain has been registered since 2016 [1] and the project has been referenced on other sites [2][3] (using some of the same rendered images). The Instagram [4] has had posts since 2017, but, again, most appear to be renders.
From adhambadr: trademark application [5] and university article [6]
[0] https://imgur.com/a/W6ogsZJ
[1] https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=blloc.com
[2] https://competition.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=54753
[3] http://startuptv.io/startups/blloc-die-smartphone-alternativ...
[4] https://www.instagram.com/bllocphone/
[5] https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/register/3020172...
[6] https://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/profund/aktuelles/news/EXIST-...
pictures are a mix of renders and post edited photos, the models changed over time as we tested / verified components
What I do see is the UI which looks good (at least on pictures), and, above all, looks consistent.
There would be definitely a market for such an UI. (It's more lucrative if sold with dedicated hardware, of course.)
I really liked the UI of windows mobile 8 (10 a bit less so) and I find it quite unfortunate that MS decided to 'kill' the platform (there are rumours about new lumia, buuuut) - it was very well optimised, it was easy to grasp and was intuitive, even for older people (got one for my dad and didn't have to explain too much how to use it).
I long for a laptop purposely designed for productivity, simplicity and minimalism. Ideally with a custom designed OS (could just be a linux distro checked for compatibility etc.) to go along with it.
Is anybody working on something in this vein?
If I'm a writer, I will need very different things than a video editor or software developer to be productive.
Although I imagine many aspects to be the same for many general needs (while clearly not for very specific needs). Ideally, those which aren't (such as, perhaps, the monitor) for said general needs could offer multiple choices.
I wanted to be inclusive by saying "productivity" since at this point I'd be open for literally anything that is purposely designed with those general goals in mind — whatever the professional pursuit. It may still be superior for my specific needs compared to all the bells and whistles I keep seeing.
I'd just grab a used thinkpad, chromebook, whatever and treat it as a dumb terminal. Pretty much how I used my laptop these days, ssh -X to a powerful machine and go. emacs --daemon / emacsclient (and of course a couple tmux/screen sessions) means I never lose my state.
My most recent search for any developments in e-ink laptops was literally yesterday. My understanding is that current e-ink screens are not technically limited to low refresh rates, but are artificially limited to save power. (I think someone hacked their e-reader to run linux at fairly high refresh rates?)
Regarding dumb terminal, if your situation allows you to I feel this is currently one of the better options available. One problems is you still need to browse the web locally and graphically and use various tools not available using emacs and/or the command line. And when internet connectivity is not available.
But... That said, building one decent chat app is a massive time sink in itself. Then do this for many different popular apps with massively varied features (Google maps, Uber, etc) - then build that all into Android, then build the hardware - this phone isn't going to be released for years.
Note that it's a pre-order and not an order, it's just not ready yet and likely will never be ready at their price point. They'll get less backers than they expect, burn through the cash faster than they want and will struggle to meet their promise. As other comments have points out, they're better off starting with lower expectations and a website people can use. That's all just assuming it's not a scam.
I can say from personal experience that it's never easier to hear either. Starting with good intentions is not the same as delivering a good product.
Out of interest, how far along is this project now in respect to hardware and software? Is it ready to ship once you have enough orders?
>We did already pull back a bit on most of our SW promises and packed them inside a "beta-mode" as we realised after testing a personal driver phone is no experimenting ground.
Don't get me wrong, your SW looks awesome. Actually, I would really love a version of this phone I could run Linux (proper Linux, not Android) on.
>This post just beat us before we finished relaunching our website with a simpler communication strategy and a def. a better website.
That's unfortunate. You should "relaunch" your PR push and get across some kind of "we listened" to cheaply get yourself back into public eye on good terms.
All I need is Calling, SMS, Whatsapp, Browsing (HN), News Occasionally, Email, Calendar, Navigation (maybe Uber)
Apart from the Black and White UI and amazing looking device, why is this any different than installing Copperhead[0] on Pixel XL and sideloading chosen apps?
I don't see how this will work but reading my messages whilst being informed about my Uber, flights, and/or weather seems quite fragmented and unfocused.
This is getting very close to what I want in a phone - a pared down smartphone that has the basic utilities for when I am away from a desktop/laptop without the social + internet distractions.
What I'd prefer is a device with no ability to download social apps, a browser, games or even news apps (when did 24/7 access to the news become a necessity?). A device like this is bold but, if it caught on, could change society in a positive way. No more endless checking of social media, the news etc. while on the go or in the company of friends/family. It could strengthen the connections that we have with others.
Also, you can just install a parental control application and block any app store downloads.
It's definitely an interesting concept, but for me at least I need a lot more information from the get-go to go ahead and pre-order.
Everything indicates this is Android based. Some remarked it was compatible with the Play Store.
Has anyone seen any details about ship-date / progress?
>The AOSP doesn't come with Google Services. You can build a device and sell it, but it will not have the incredibly important set of Google Apps people love, not even Google Play (so people cannot go and download Google Maps and Gmail afterwards).
Hmmm, and yet this comes with Google Maps... Suspicious...
Edit: A post below indicates that it is Android 8.1. I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like a trademark violation to sell Android but call it something else.
In other words, I think you've got it backwards: you're not allowed to use Google's branding/trademarks (including "Android") unless you have authorization from Google. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any requirement to call the OS "Android" even with that authorization; the word "Android" doesn't show up at all in the official product page for Samsung's Galaxy S9 [0].
[0]: https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-s/galaxy-s9-...
It's not just that it's not visible, it's the Blloc is pretending they invented an entire new os ("Blloc OS").
Amazon Fire is a different story, because they package their own app store (not the Google Play Store). But Blloc is loading the Play Store. I am fairly sure that a requirement of doing so means you have to accept the Google branding (i.e. you have to call it Android).
Regardless, worst-case is they just have to tweak their OS branding to be "Android with Blloc Root" (which is what HTC does, i.e. "Android with HTC Sense"). Yet I'm not finding anything which explicitly requires that (only finding instances where use of Android branding is not allowed, e.g. FireOS).
For some time my wife and I have both been wanting a dumber minimal smartphone, to help break our addiction to our phones without depriving us of their usefulness. This might be a good fit, but it's hard to tell from the website.
Quite minimal phone-only phones do exist, like Punkt MP 101, or more conventional phones, especially kids-oriented.
Edit: I got my Moto F3 for 20 bucks, the Punkt is 229. Nope.
My wife uses the moto G Play. <150USD for a perfectly functional phone, and frankly I'd even call it "far from minimal," (it has features that many flagships unfortunately don't support any more, e.g. sd cards, removable batteries, and headphone jacks) and for years have looked for an even more commodity platform myself since I have no need for apps or beefy hardware. (GPS, text, html only browser, email, with barely enough horsepower to run the above + a beefy battery would be the pipedream, and sounds _not too far_ from the brick phones I used ~20 years back)
As I told a coworker when I saw this post: Either our expectations of "minimal" or the english language has gotten entirely out of wack, because 350 pounds for a smartphone is so far from minimal as to be laughable. Maybe a "minimal flagship" (and this is where I'm inclined to think the gap between your view on this and mine is, where you said 'if you find good specs cheaper'. Perhaps my view on "good" is a much lower bar, but I'm perfectly happy with my 60$, 5 year old Lumia, and find it to be _far more minimal_, while directly challenging your "break down sooner or later" assertion; I've had droid flagships that didn't last as long.)
The mental dissonance came for me simply from my perception of the word "minimal;" I have a wonderful moment of "Oh man someone's finally making the phone I wish I could buy" whenever I see a thread with this or similar verbiage, then the sad realization that I'm apparently too far to the 'throw out everything but your matress' side of minimal.
I was simply surprised to have not seen other feedback along this vein, and moreso when the other commenter was going grey for advocating what I thought were some good examples of models in that range.
Anyway, I'd want to cap this with a friendly "good luck"; Don't take my jaded disappointment as anything more than the whinging of someone tilting at the windmills of eternally larger and more expensive phones. (Although if you DO ever get the chance to advocate for a truly bare-bones-minimalism in a future product, here's a hearty nudge nudge from this curmudgeon.)
If wish you good luck of course, but just be aware that building the phone — that’s the easy part: sales, support and the software — that’s a lot of “stuff” that costs significant money — an expense that continues past the shipping of the actual device.
There are two ways to win in the phone business- market share/volume or profit per unit. You are also competing against established manufacturers with essentially a barely-deferentiated product and, given your margins, customer acquisition is going to be very, very tough.
If it were me, I’d work on a completely new OS — I’d build an entirely new thing rather than just something marginally different — and ostensibly, marginally better. A generic phone with a different flavor of Android — do you really want to go up against the Samsung’s and Huawei’s?
No disrespect intended — I hope you succeed!
Sure, it ain't in the same price bracket as a bargain-bin ZTE or Moto phone, but it ain't in the same specs bracket, either.
Is there a functionality reason that restricts the OS to the Blloc hardware, or might we see OS builds for certain hardware targets available for purchase eventually?
All focus on the typography and making stuff “look cool”, without any concern for how the page actually functions or how the device would actually function.
All UI, no UX.
Thanks for your time!
Good luck running e.g. Google Maps or Firefox on a CHIP.
But someone will create a clamshell like device as the old 90-00's PDA with Linux, and it will show Android as a clunky device to create media instead of being just a TV substitute.