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

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

#61

I appreciate these basic phones but what I need is something different. I would prefer 2 phones: a regular smartphone and a basic feature phone. Then I’d take the one I need when I leave the house. 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.

I suggest taking a look at https://palm.com/pages/product.

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

#62
These boutique pieces of tech are bound to fail because they don't stand upon the shoulders of giants.

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).

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m waiting for the day I can have an Apple Watch without ever needing an iPhone to manage it, and an iPad to do real dev work (ie, Xcode for iPad) without ever having to fall back on a Mac/Book. I’ve been waiting for years already so now I’m not sure those days will ever actually arrive.

Depends on your particular flavor of 'real' dev. https://vscode.dev/ and an SSH app and a web browser.

My bar is being able to execute a compiled binary produced with clang/gcc.

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

#64

These boutique pieces of tech are bound to fail because they don't stand upon the shoulders of giants. 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…

[deleted]

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

#66
post #24

These types of phones keep getting made and people keep not buying them in any significant numbers. I think people want to want this kind of phone. But it ends up being a kind of performance art thing / statement about modern society thing more than filling an actual demand in the market.

[flagged]

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

#67
post #46

You can do a lot of this on an iPhone if you use focus modes and automations. 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 giv…

Could you share how you set that up? Sounds effective.

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

#68
post #46

You can do a lot of this on an iPhone if you use focus modes and automations. 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 giv…

This sounds pretty great, how do you achieve it?

Shortcuts, presumably

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

#69
post #24

These types of phones keep getting made and people keep not buying them in any significant numbers. I think people want to want this kind of phone. But it ends up being a kind of performance art thing / statement about modern society thing more than filling an actual demand in the market.

Maybe price is a factor? If this thing cost $100 you'd see mass adoption.

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

#70
Isn't the form factor a little odd, or is that just me? How would you even hold that?

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.

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