Minimal Phone 2
minimalcompany.com
minimalcompany.com
Similarly the comments here: if only it could do all this and
* On/off button round the back
* More LTE bands
* An open bootloader (note to normies this is like saying "have a quantum multiplexer")
* Different screen ratio
* Different keyboard layouts
* Eink screen
* Bigger battery
* Be easier to use for someone with long fingernails (hello Nosferatu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49751114)
* Be lighter
* Be smaller
* Have a website without javascript (really)
* Be cheaper (this one is satire) (no it's not)
Sure guys, why can't someone just build you your personal phone at the same price as the iPhone whose development costs are amortized over seval billions consumers :-/
Long nails are somewhat common as an aesthetic/cosmetic choice usually for women (ime). No need to make a joke around accessible design.
Also the parent comment reminded me of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VjpcLplkMUs
One could extrude keys to be softer so that they errode faster and have the symbol all the way though.
Slight problem, and it's not clear whether you've realised this: everybody else in the world knows that we can't have everything! Still, it's good to have goals, even if they can't be met, and it'd be monstrous to mock the ambition on display - which I do declare we should in fact salute. Good on you sir/madam, for not being a cynical jaded asshole like the rest of us.
It's not "ambition" when it's what other people should do for you.
I don’t think you helped the normies out.
Anyone with a resemblance of a functioning brain (that is, any "normie" included) can understand "ability to install and run custom aftermarket operating system, or modify pre-installed one", assuming they know what an "operating system" is. And if they don't know what it is, that can - and should (!) - be explained too.
This ability matters to people who don't know any much about any computer programming, because it affects their ability to use the devices they own. They may not know how it all works, but they do express regrets when something doesn't work the way they expect or want it to work. And we all know and hate enshittification here, don't we? Personally, I'm tired of saying "no, because Apple/Google decided only they can control this, and neither you or me can change this on this device" to "can this work so-and-so" questions.
And "open bootloader" is a jargon shorthand for that. Crude, because it should be actually more like "bootloader that can be configured to validate software integrity with user-provided key material", but most people familiar with the space and lingo get the right idea anyway, and shorthand needs to be short. And this is Hacker News, not a Wendy's, so jargon is more than expected.
If someone (a "normie") reads something and don't understand it, we should all be encouraging them to ask questions and try to give them accessible answers. Not shield them from this knowledge, not fetishize mindless consumerism, not behave like snobs, and especially not dismiss something important only because it's not commonly understood.
For marketing materials that target "normie" audiences, it should be just phrased in "normie"-accessible way (look how Valve does that with their hardware), but when we're compiling a HN wishlist from HN comments, complaining about jargon is silly.
/rant
Because most of those specialist's will make the same demands in the same jargon outside those spaces, too. And wonder why the ressonance is so low.
In fact, jargon is only "low resonance" until it isn't; plenty of key social and political issues resolve around jargon terms normies have no more fucking clue about now than before, but it doesn't stop them from discussing it like they were experts - all it takes is bunch of pundits on the news to say the jargon words out loud with straight face, be it "open bootloader" or "MRNA vaccines" or "COVID-19 pandemic" or "fracking" or "monosodium glutamate", and suddenly everyone is an expert.
It's just a matter of the topic having a popularity spike.
My point was just that nerds are indeed bad at communicating their knowledge to the "normie" world. Because they forget what is daily lingo for them - is just black magic to them.
Everyone - save for people with developmental difficulties or ahedonia - has a specialty, something they know that the majority of other folks don’t. Every such domain of knowledge (useful or otherwise) has its shorthands and jargonisms.
Some domains of knowledge lag behind their technological adoption. Which is natural and fine, except that society at large got infected with this silly idea of normalizing mindless consumption with a shallow (if any) underlying mental model. In other words, the nerds are actively told to shut up and keep their mumbo jumbo talk to themselves and spare people from knowing how things work under the hood.
So it’s not just that those silly nerds bad at communicating. That too, but it’s meeting with the unwillingness to learn is what makes it truly bad. It’s in the very idea of a “normie” - an anti-knowledge, ignorance-normalizing, curiosity-dampening attitude - that’s to blame. Not that nerds use nerdy words on nerdy websites and that usage spreads to less nerdy areas - that’s part is just life as usual.
BTW, those “loud idiots” are the actual normal people learning and making mistakes (including the mistake of overconfidence - especially easy to make when something feels important) and having opinions. Modern mass communications changed the world’s landscape, so instead of a few peers in their kitchen they’re broadcasting their knowledge (including the errors in it) to orders of magnitude more people and that sometimes gains traction - but that’s a separate issue, very far from nerds and their words.
Ive been curious about that since that us vs ms thing.
I think it's what keeps developers oblivious about how computers work? Paper over the insanity?
Yes?
Their website also requires a User-Agent headeer
Given the low level of traffic, IME this is unusual
* SD card slot to store that special music
* Multiple physical SIMs because eSIMs can't be trusted
* Multiple eSIMs because physical SIMs are dumb
* LoRa for meshtastic because the network can't be trusted
* Drug scale for weighing drugs
(Actually, just put the drug scale on there and great teaming throngs of people will immediately forget that they ever owned an iPhone.)
> Headphone jack for special music
you've got it wrong,
that scale is for measuring transactions in Au.
Once you have all that, it is how do you sell it, and sell enough unit to even have a ROI. And that is ignoring UI / software.
I don't think people on HN understand, hardware business is brutal.
Every single time one of these new "minimal", "dumb", "lightweight" phones comes up today it's just marketing wrapped around a kneecapped Android device. I am in the market for something simpler that does nothing more or little else than play local media/audio, read common document/text formats, ordinary SMS, current standard of telephony, and a different OS than Android. I have not seen anything like this yet.
If they try to move in that direction, we can protest it then. Denying ourselves a useful capability now doesn't stop it from happening anyway, nor make it more likely.
If I see a tiger crotched in the bushes, is it a fallacy to gather my children and head back to the cave?
Pattern recognition is not a fallacy.
But I have no interest in winning internet arguments. You win, the cookie isn't worth it to me.
If they can't do online banking in 2026 your bank might actually just be some guy in a monopoly man Halloween costume.
For a while Research in Motion (RIM) / Blackberry had a hiring website at https://rim.jobs , until somebody told them what it meant.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22rim.jo...
Tcl (programming language) has a fantastic test suite, but building a test or throwaway script with the name “test.tcl” is discouraged.
Except the Commodore Callback[1], which is based on Linux (SailfishOS). It's pretty minimal and should meet your requirements, in theory.
Compelling, but still wanting a Nokia 33xx brick recall.
truth is its quite difficult to function today without a smartphone.
banks, uber, food etc etc
edit: remember iphone mini? so "many" asked for it and apple finally made it. it was a flop.
Uber can be done totally headless, without a screen?
Food? Get outta here.
The reality is 90% or more of people don’t care about that or even think about it, this sentiment only exists in online tech enthusiast spaces. If you’re in HN you’re as non-representative of the average consumer as one can get.
Ideally everyone would just have the discipline to just keep what they need on their phone without trying to fix their problem with an overpriced gimmick that they will give up on after a few months.
If you don’t want to live under Zuckerberg’s boot you should fight him every chance you get.
SMS still works.
The only problems I've had were a single barber that accepts reservations over WhatsApp exclusively - so I go to the barber two shops over and don't need a reservation. And some women from dating apps refuse to talk on the phone before talking over WhatsApp. That's fine, there are plenty of fish in that sea.
I do want a smartphone - just not one that is in full control of corporations considering me not really a customer, but an asset for their main business - advertisement. Or well the alternative, a company that thinks I am too stupid to be in charge of my phone (and also introduces more and more advertisement).
First thing I do is flash lineageos+microg then root.
For instance: their bank, or 2 factor for their work. Or a parking app for their building. Society now often assumes you can use an app.
It's hard to cover those cases without using one of the two major OSes.
What's the advantage of blackberry over a stripped-down/limited android?
The question is why you care about that.
I'd love to go back and get a Blackberry, the pre-QNX one, but I think Android is the least-bad option here. We need certain apps, and Android is the only way we'll get them.
Definitely a game changer, maybe even more than Brick because the desktop is where I do all my work
They make the screen effectively narrower in terms of usable area, while making the phone physically wider.
Do not want.
Please go back to 9:16 or 10:16 screen ratios. If you need more space for the battery, gently round the back. It feels nicer in the hand even when it's 50% thicker than your competitors.
Also, a fingerprint reader / power button on the back is superior to all other placements, and cutouts of any kind are distracting and wasteful. OnePlus managed a motorized pop-out selfie-cam and it's still working for me seven years later.
It's too bad they had to be extreme about it and ruin it with a huge screen and a 5:3 aspect ratio. it's almost a cube.
Huawei Global is still a thing, and in some markets they keep releasing phones using Android 12 and no GMS. That is probably even worse.
Why do we even need 12 GB RAM for distraction free phone? Why there is no microSD port?
So it still requires a user to have self-control. If people had that, they could just uninstall the problematic apps from the phone they already have.
… if you have root access with adb (assuming android, I don’t know much about iOS)
* Messaging (in 99% of the world)
* Maps
* Uber etc.
Messaging is the really big one.
But of course I have signal for group chats. it works on desktop tho so I can just check messages when I get home like the olden days.
GPS I like my offline maps built into my car. It’s getting harder to find updates as everyone moves to the cloud.
I like the minimal and solid looking design. I think the real keyboard is an interesting and welcoming compromise for its width. If the built quality is on point, I'd see no issue with the price.
Full Android also means there's no restriction in the apps I'd need. GrapheneOS on it would be great.
I appreciate the minimal color options - I have this thing where all my technical devices running software should be in all black, and any colorful details would just bother me a bit (looking at "playful" design choices like the lime green switch on the Fairphone 6).
Quick nitpick at their marketing team: "compact by design, made for one hand." can't possibly be true with a real keyboard on a phone.
I might pick one of these up in the de-Googled variant and keep my iPhone around for all the "attestation required to view your bank balance" apps that I have.
It's an Android phone, with pretty decent specs. Nothing is stopping you from installing social media apps and doomscrolling all day and night, and chances are you will do that if that's what you do with your phone, just as you can just delete social media apps from your current phone.
The custom UI and physical keyboard are innovative though, I don't think I've seen a physical keyboard with touch support before, and I wish them the best.
Note that modern flip/soapbar phones (Commodore, KaiOI) usually support some social media, including WhatsApp.
Banking apps are a problem though, and really contribute locking everyone in the iOS/Android duopoly, and that sucks.
The way I imagined it is that I'd still have my main smartphone at home and maybe for office days at work, but bring the other one when I go out, to visit friends or family, etc. Being out and about is where I think not having the attention-grabbing and distractions is most important. At home, I feel like I personally can control it quite well myself.
It's the very idea of having two devices instead of one that still keeps me from these things, though. Even if I only ever had one with me, that's still about twice the work of maintenance, updates, remembering to charge, having two lines...
I kept reading though, kind-of envying the physical keyboard because that would be fun, but I'm a swipe-typing guy through and through. Then I saw that it supports swipe typing, possibly by sliding your fingers across the keyboard. The idea of swiping across those keys literally gave me frisson, won't lie. That would be so groovy.
Edit: Verizon would also benefit from b48, although that may be optional.
Not sure if I will actually get one since my Pixel 4a 5g (w/ LineageOS + microG) is still going strong, but I will admit that I'm tempted by this.
I think many people who use them start to realize that having a small phone isn’t that great. Having more screen real estate and a larger battery is so much more beneficial than being able to reach everything with one hand, and then the popsocket pretty much solves the one hand issue.
I can reach the top of my screen with my iPhone 17 Pro Max because my phone has a PopSocket on the back, and my fingers are below average short.
I hope they prove me wrong so I can buy Minimal Phone 3!
Though you can probably just install Aurora Store or F-Droid and install from there. Some apps don't work (you'll notice they didn't show Uber in the examples) and recently I've been having issues with Aurora and suspect its days are numbered so I'd be concerned about the future of that before buying something like this.
Previous spotlight on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40609095
I realise many full android and iOS phones have features that allow you to reduce usage, but there’s a difference between something designed to do it, and something that just adds some easy bypassable settings on top. From what I read about this you have to factory reset your phone to bypass the restrictions you setup (if you choose that mode) so it seems cool to me.
I'm typing on my pixel 6 Pro and it still feels satisfying.
Gimmick?
Not that I’d trade screen real estate for keyboards nowadays, but there’s probably still some diehards out there that want them
I'm going to have to think carefully about why I should NOT order this device.
When you get old, your ability to type reliably on a phone's touchscreen keyboard starts to go down the pan. Having actual tactile "things" to land on can make it easier.
Virtual keyboard haptic feedback seems more like gimmick. If it actually serves a functional purpose, I'd be surprised and interested. Maybe if you had feedback activate as you glide through the keys, but Google's keyboard at least doesn't.
There's also something to be said about touch-typing. Even though it was slower due to T9, I miss the dumbphone days of being able to type an error-free message without ever having to look down at the keys.
Not sure about the key waterproofing of this phone, but not being able to type out in the rain is another thing that really makes me dislike touchscreen typing.
Maybe swipe typing isn't as popular as I first thought.
day 1 the plb is slower than swipe typing because it needs getting used to. But the trick is one can focus one's attention on the content being typed /learn to touch type on a physical keyboard that on screen keyboards cant do, because of lack of consistency of on screen kbs always shifting layouts on you, at least with coming and going but usually also ruining the dot menu for common punctuation depending on if the input field is trying to be an email or a number or whatever.
dont try to help me keyboard, just give me a ctrl character, consistent shortcuts, and don't lag half the time I enter some text input, so I've typed out 4 words before the phone realizes anything has happened.
so yes i think you are right that swipe typing has value and more people should use it. but its lipstick on a pig for most of osks not being reliably static enough to let muscle memory / touch typing grow.
my unihertz titan 2 also has capacitive keys, i turn them off because I want the kb as dumb as possible (though i add keymapper android app to give me vim style arrow keys), but swipe typing would be possible on my or this device with just software support if there were demand for it / someone got their llm to vibe it up.
I've been strictly a Sony Xperia user for almost 15 years now, and Sony had its own keyboard app early on, which they later discontinued. Swipe typing on the Xperia keyboard is still the fastest and most precise I've ever been able to write on a phone, nothing else ever came close. Then they stopped development and moved over to a Microsoft keyboard, I think. I've never found another keyboard that did swipe typing as well as Sony.
I’m not a fan of the physical keyboard, the broad shape(they say one handed use immediately followed by a video of someone using both hands to type). I’m okay with the candy bar all screen phones of today. The UX is pretty cool if I can have it on my “regular” phone..
Anybody have an idea if it is doable on an iPhone or an android phone?
If you set up a swipe to launch another launcher, you can have all your widgets there, as sometimes that's nice for a multi-app overview of Stuff™ at a glance.
The lack of substantial info on Minimal OS makes it a non-starter, though, and that makes me sad. Security and privacy are job #1 for a smartphone, and there's no way I'm running El Rando OS just because the hardware is cute.
If they partnered with Graphene OS, I'd happily pay twice their asking price, though.
I'd want different containers (sandboxes), depending on the things I'm doing.
There's a better video here which describes a text-based interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryFV1wHD8FM
Oh, thank you. We need that. It's refreshing to know that we might have the option to buy a cell phone with less than 6.5 inch size.
And HN is arguably better than doomscrolling TikTok or Facebook, even with the current LLM/Rust/LLM in Rust spam.
Sadly for now they’re too expensive to buy just as an experiment.
-Phone/texting -Messengers like WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. -Maps -Music/podcasts
Ideally with e-ink.
I want something that doesn't compete with a full-fledged smartphone (which I'd still keep for travel and stuff). I want something to take to the office, hanging out with friends, etc, where bringing the smartphone becomes a decision.
For some anything after SMS is not dumb enough (ok, this still exists), others would be ok with just a browser, and you said Maps and WA/etc/.
I am not even sure I could give you a good enough definition, I'm kinda happy enough with Android and just ignore any dumb/minimal angle, because if I only take a phone with me I generally want to potentially use it as a computer replacement. There are really only 2 people I call regularly.
Yes, but I think anyone interested in this would know what they don't want: TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or any other app that wants you to spend maximum time in their app.
Unless we're talking about complete purists who basically want a 2003 level phone that only does call/text, there's lots of flexibility.
Someone who wants a less addicting phone but doesn't necessarily require maps is unlikely to not buy because of a maps app. It's not like they'd spend 3 hours a day getting directions.
- decent camera
- messaging apps (WhatsApp/telegram/signal/etc)
- maps
- rideshare (uber/lyft)
- mobile wallet (tap to pay)
People will also demand a browser, but that kind of defeats the purpose. All the apps should be utilities that you can’t spend hours in.
I suspect people would also demand music streaming, but I’m not sure really why you need that.
If it natively plugged into the Apple ecosystem, now that would be difficult to refuse.
Some still disagree.
Also looks like they sell cellular plans too https://plans.minimalcompany.com/#plans
Inevitably I have to carry two phones around Anyone find a solution around this?
Unfortunately, it is as wide as a regular iPhone (i.e. the 17e), so it’s not an iPhone mini/SE replacement in terms of one-handed use.
At 158 grams it’s also heavier than any mini/SE.
I also doubt this. When I observe people out in town, most of them stare at their phones non-stop. To get to pick them up that often, they'd first have to put them down every now and then.
I ordered the Astro Slide 5G and never received it, so much for me getting to see what all of the psion fuss was about, so this device is both tempting and making me remember past regrettable experiences.
ouch and open boootloader
Creating a minimal phone is almost impossible, because it means different things to different people. Mine could be a Nokia style candy bar design, because I don't need a large screen or a camera, but it does require completely custom applications.
Update: didn't scroll down enough! Indeed they have. Neat.
The way I use my phone--mostly for reading--in my case just means that most of the time I would have this thing I don't need taking up space.
But I guess it's good to have alternative, people use things in different ways.
But I'm not convinced anymore that the actual typing experience is any good. Way before that exciting section, there's a video where somebody takes two full seconds to type "Hey bro you" on this phone's keyboard. I tried: in the same amount of time, I can type "Hey bro you mean everything to me" on my Pixel's default keyboard.
as for the rest, I fail to see why pay extra for this niche nonsense when you can achieve exactly same thing with whatever Android launcher you prefer, only differentiator of this device is physical keyboard
crap specs with only 90Hz display and MediaTek Dimensity 8300 for 600+ USD and it is not even released yet, but maybe in few months when these specs will look even worse than they already are
I hate switching phones and I am not buying short-lived devices anymore if I can help it.