I bet the battery life would be awesome on this phone.
Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#92You 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.
For me I use the accessibility shortcut, three presses of the side button pops up a menu so I can select color filters (grey scale) and reduce white point (80% is my default). I enable both when I am reading. It's really helped eye strain when I'm reading.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality is that most people do not want to carry multiple devices around. Carrying some kind of minimalist phone for text and voice, and a tablet or other device for "apps" isn't really a great experience.
Yeah, or charge every night, or look for when you're in a hurry to get out the door, etc. Or buy, for that matter. Probably what I'd rather have is a phone that has a low power low function mode, that I can configure what apps are available, and then a regular mode where everything is available. But to get to it, I need to convince a LLM equivalent of Seinfeld's soup nazi why I need it.
Yeah a phone with an easy toggle between "dumb" and "smart" would be handy, especially if "dumb" mode had greatly increased battery life, but I don't think it would appeal to enough people to motivate making one.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#94I recorded a video of another e ink phone running many common Android apps really well (in direct sunlight)! 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 appa…
How is the camera? I don't really care how the photos look on the device, but I would be sending them to family via Telegram and of course later on the desktop. I do have other E-Ink devices (Boox, Nook) and I love them, so I'd love to get an E-Ink phone. But I don't want to carry a separate camera.
It’s not a great camera. Worse than my iPhone 8. Maybe somewhere around my iPhone 4 or 5S quality. So it's usable. I can upload a video later.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#95These 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.
I've signed up and sent contributions to a few "let's build a phone!" projects (like, for example, the neo900). I've come to the conclusion that building a phone is just not something a small group of people can do on a small budget. They won't get access to good processors, etc, because their projected volumes are too small to interest suppliers. The project inevitably ends up being very, very late. They can't build many prototypes and test them extensively, so if something actually gets shipped, it will be buggy.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#96I love the aesthetic of phones like this, but I'm not sold on comments like this (from the reddit ama in the article):
> 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.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#97Looks interesting. I’m fascinated by e-ink and the oddball devices which use it. I wish I had the cash to collect them all (though I did get a Remarkable tablet the other day).
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.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#98Ugh another minimal phone that tries to sell me new hardware. 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…
You have no idea how much it pleases people in charge to have complete surveillance. It's pathetic.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#99The problem with eink phones is that they're largely unsupported / using some OS that I don't trust. 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.
I would guess that a phone designed with an eink display will have visual design and UX that is more thoughtfully designed for greyscale than iOS or Android.
I was always taught that a design should be done first in greyscale to make sure that it works well using only alignment, hirearchy, balance etc, then you add colour; I still see that done frequently in print design, but less so in the digital world for whatever reason.
Re: Minimal phone gets back to basics with E Ink display and real keyboard
#100I've got major doubts on a lot of these claims. Shimmying modern Android into an e-Ink display and physical keyboard is going to be a strange experience even if you truly want a zero-distraction phone. 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 o…
E-ink has really come a long way, applications that involve lots of motion won't be that awful. I bought a Hisense A5C smartphone a couple years ago, which is an android smartphone with a (color!) e-ink display. I bought it as more of a toy/experiment, knowing it wouldn't support US carriers, to see what an e-ink smartphone would be like. I really ended up liking the concept. https://youtu.be/9vvhbPHFoio?t=20
I knew about the HiSense eink phones before, but this one makes me particularly sad. This would be a great device for me if it was well supported in North America. Alas…