Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvO9ScTdwz8

It's the Hisense A9 with a beautiful and fast Carta 1200 e ink display. It's very capable, I would have preferred a phone more like that instead. It's biggest drawback is terrible USA cell reception. This company was initially going to make a phone like this but apparently keyboards were much more popular in polls.

[0]: https://www.thelightphone.com/

(I started and curate /r/ergomobilecomputers, /u/magictheblathering is a familiar username)

See also this comment with more links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39576514

I have a deep work mode that sets a blank Home Screen, turns off always on display, sets the phone to greyscale and only allows notifications from my wife.

It feels like something like this gets you most of the way there and you can then have different focus levels that ramp up potential distractions. All without carrying two devices or giving up the modcons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/198y1xi/minimal...

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMinimalCompany/comments/1aoq90q/...

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/my-company-got-funded-mill...

and

https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/1b35fuz/please_exerci...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-minimal-phone-first-e...

Their estimated shipping date is August 2024, which seems wildly optimistic.

I don't think there's anything wrong with current smartphone hardware. What I want is someone to reimagine the OS. My phone should be like a Startrek Tricorder - a very advanced tool that can assist me with anything. The key metric should be how much time it saves me... not how much time I waste using it.

What I don't want is spyware, ads, and interactions designed to maximize my engagement. I need to be able to use feature rich apps sometimes, but I also want very hard limits that I set on my social media usage and other time wasting activities. Every single blocker app completely sucks and needs to be implemented as an OS feature. Screen time on iOS isn't enough and Digital Wellbeing on Android is a joke. Sometimes I don't have the willpower to overcome the digital crack at my finger tips.

So bad I want a new OS to enter the market that reimagines my phone as just a tool and not the center of my life. Apple could do it and has the right incentives (kinda) but I don't understand why they don't make screen time more feature rich with an API. I've never owned an iPhone but I would finally switch if they did this.

Edit: I'm being too harsh to the creators of this phone. Clearly I am not the customer. I just want a solution that doesn't involve giving up useful tools like Maps.

The problem is you either need two lines with your carrier or swap physical sims. Swapping physical sims is inconvenient and means you cant use an esim.

> Yes, Minimal runs on Android, allowing you to download and use essential apps. However, the e-ink display and device optimization are geared towards minimizing unnecessary distractions.

That answers the only question I had about this. You still get full access to every app you need, it just increases the friction (via the low refresh rate and the lack of colors) so you can't doomscroll.

Unfortunately, it does not list Bluetooth among its many wireless features, so I don't think I'd be able to use it. Not having music or podcasts in the car or on a run is a dealbreaker.

Make something with a wide enough screen (say, 2.5" wide) and a height that maps to a common aspect ratio (maybe 4"?), let it have some bulk (like... 1" thick?) and suddenly you have a distinctive object that has enough space for all the electronics + a decent battery.

If this could be a wireless access point, I think that could be a differentiator. I would love a more minimal phone for daily carry -- but when travelling, it'd be nice to connect my iPad/laptop to an AP for those things that need modern apps.

> Its durability also means less frequent replacements, countering the disposable culture of modern electronics.

My starting point is that the most eco-friendly phone avilable to me is the one I already have. That comment reads to me as saying that if you have a fault you need a replacement instead of being able to opt for repair. I simply do not believe that a phone that isn't built to be repaired can be considered more eco-friendly than not buying a new phone.

The CEO has promised more information about repairability closer to launch and I hope they follow through; I would guess that compared to the average phone purchase the overlap of people who want a minimal phone and people who want a repairable phone is pretty high.

Otherwise this phone will be unusable in 6 months according to my company's BYOD security policy.

I tried using my phone in grayscale mode for a while, but the complete lack of colours makes it difficult to use.

I'm working on making a "desaturated" mode that changes the android renderer to not go fully grayscale, but only a little, so there's still some colour information.

As far as I can see, there’s no mention of a backlight. An e-ink phone sounds great but if you can’t see the screen in the dark that’s a problem.

Here is what I would call a minimal phone: https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3310-192.php

Unfortunately those are all now bricked by the 2G/3G shutdown and nobody makes a phone with a similar feature set (i.e. absence of everything but voice calls) any more. The Jitterbug Flip 2 comes sort of close but it still has Alexa and other confusing stuff, and you can't buy it without an overpriced subscription.

I've been looking for a phone simple enough to not confuse some of my elderly family members and those phones no longer exist. So I'm constantly the involuntary tech support for whatever phone they use. I think of buying a cheap Android phone and writing a kiosk mode app that has no access to anything except dialing the phone. Maybe someday.

Supposedly it's going to protect your privcy but they also claim you can just download apps from the Play store. Seems like a bit of an unnecessary promise.

Navigation with map apps in particular is going to be awful on the e-ink display. Really, a lot of "basic" non-social media non-addicting apps involve a lot of motion that plain and simple isn't designed for e-ink. Uber is highlighted as one of these apps that you might want to use without a distracting smartphone, but think about how much motion is involved with the Uber user interface when you use it. The whole interface plus the map is doing a bunch of smooth motions that do not take low refresh rates into account.

The physical keyboard basically has to be there due to the shortcomings of the display, but I think when you go back to physical keyboards on phones you'll quickly realize that they are awful to type on compared to modern predictive autocorrect. They also can't adapt at all to the specific apps on the system. Say goodbye to emojis, stickers, and GIFs when you talk to your friends! Imagine what Slack will look like on this thing, and that's an app I have to use for work!

Another odd claim is that the device will be $400 but be available with early bird discounts below that! That's an impossible price for an incredibly niche phone with heavily customized software.

One last comment on this concept: when you think about the most mainstream smartphones in the world, what is the most physically distinguishing physical feature on them – the one cosmetic feature that identifies the phone with a brand? That's right, the cameras. That's no coincidence: it's the most important feature of the smartphone. It isn't mentioned at all with this phone, and questions about it on the AMA were ignored.

At face value it seems like video calls and perhaps even sending simple photographs will be a major challenge on this phone. I think most people who want to curb smartphone addiction aren't looking to compromise healthy things like sending photos and videos to their family and friends.

I just get a feeling from the AMA [1] that this company is biting off more than they can chew.

Finally, it's plainly obvious that you can get all of the "unique" features of this phone by setting up simple OS settings, like setting your screen to greyscale and setting up screen time/disallowing social media app installs. Essentially, this company is trying to sell an OS preference pane as a standalone product. It will fail.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMinimalCompany/comments/19a6xr5/...

Overall, the device has been far superior to any earlier Android device I've owned for overall readability, usability, battery life, and satisfaction.

For a demonstration of what e-ink displays are capable of, see this video, which starts basic (static signage systems), and progresses through video-capable displays (not, it's true, high quality, but serviceable): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4>

An Onyx BOOX Note displaying video, similar to my own device: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XRDJv_-wWBI>.

For e-ink tablets and mobile devices there are typically multiple display modes, which can be set on both a per-app and overall system basis. It's reasonably easy to switch between these where needed (e.g., on a Web browser). Higher-quality rendering comes with slower refresh, and there's a trade-off for visual quality vs. speed, but even basic animation is possible with only very modest quality degradation. "X-mode" for full video sacrifices a lot of quality, but you'd typically use that only for video-intensive apps (or occasional video viewing in a Web browser). The main side-effect is ghosting at higher refresh speeds.

Android devices can use third-party app stores such as F-Droid (VERY strongly recommended), with an independent selection of apps, or the Aurora Store alternative interface to Google Play Store which provides any Android app available through Google Play. I minimise the apps I've installed, and have avoided virtually all authenticated services (one article-managing app excepted), to minimise distractions, but have several installed from both sources.

E-ink itself does have its strengths and weaknesses. I like to say: Persistence is free; pixels are cheap; paints are expensive; refreshes are slow (1-8 Hz rather than 60--120); shades and colours are limited or nonexistent; line-art, dithered images, and half tones render quite well (raster and gradients far less so); paginated navigation is vastly better than scrolling; graphics are reflective rather than emissive; touch/Wacom may exist; and feature-detection capabilities are limited (e.g., CSS @media queries). It's a different medium, and rewards some adaptation of design principles. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...>.

I'd make one further addition: dark-on-light styles are hugely preferable to "dark-mode" (light-on-dark), which is far more difficult to read. Generally, e-ink prefers full black on full white styling.

I'll note that apps which are designed for e-ink, most particularly EinkBro (an adaptation of the FOSS Browser) make for a much superior experience: <https://github.com/plateaukao/einkbro>.

And yes, there are full e-ink monitors which are available for desktop systems: <https://shop.boox.com/products/mira>

It happened just last week when I was buying a car. The sales rep kept insisting that I install the car company's app while I was trying to just write a check, grab the keys, and drive off the lot. "You can use your Google or Facebook identity to make signup quicker!" Not only can I not actually install the app, I don't even have a Google or Facebook account. Eventually he relented and showed me "his wife's" car -- which happens to be the most expensive car on the lot -- on his own phone so I could see how the app worked. (His wife's car had an odometer reading of 6 miles per what I saw in the app running on his phone, but I'm sure she just hasn't had a chance to drive it yet anywhere except home from the dealership yet.)

For situations like that I usually have to tell them, "I don't have a phone with me that can do that." Then they get really confused, convinced that I have no idea what I'm talking about that that all I have to do is open the App Store and search for the app. The problem is my "App Store" is F-Droid. Why on earth I wouldn't be cool with just handing over my privacy to Google or Apple is completely lost to them, and most of the time I have neither the time nor desire to try to explain it to them. So I just end up coming across as some weirdo asshole by refusing to "just install the app."

We need more people using phones that respect their privacy and that don't have an umbilical cord to Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

We see it everywhere in the phone world: phones aimed at the elderly have buggy horrible software and become quickly abandoned; modern feature phones are buggy, slow and incomplete because nobody in their right mind assigns their best engineers to the dumb phone division, not Nokia, not LG; plus small companies like Mudita, Punkt, Light and others don't have the know how to produce a complete device.

The only real solution is the true "hacker path"of taking existing perfected and mass produced technology and achieve your goal with a few small modifications. If your goal is to have a basically "dumb" experience, why aren't you getting a bunch of 5yo Xiaomi phones, follow the extremely safe guides and flash LineageOS without Google Services on them? And maybe pair them with a SIM card with no data? This way you get a snappy phone with actually usable offline applications (and you can sideload the ones you truly need).