Minimal Phone: Low-priced smartphone with E Ink display and complete keyboard
Minimal Phone: Low-priced smartphone with E Ink display and complete keyboard
The Minimal Phone is a smartphone with an E Ink screen instead of a conventional LCD or OLED screen. It also features a physical keyboard.
Before you get excited, it's an IndieGoGo project.
The one and only time I bought into a project on Indiegogo was for a phone that said it was shipping that month, even though the company had been delaying it for a year already (unbeknownst to me) and they had no idea when they were going to finish. It was straight up fraud, Indiegogo let the company do it without consequence, and 2.5 years later the project is still up on Indiegogo. Now I’m out $800, and the asshole company is still claiming they’ll send all the backers their phones any day now. They’ve been literally saying it for years.
Don’t learn the hard way like I had to. Never back an Indiegogo project.
Aww shucks I was actually a bit interested
Is there something in particular about Indiegogo that I missed, or are you just pointing out it's crowd funded? (and that means you could lose your money without anything in return)
Probably the chances of them never delivering being more than 0
They have a history of really hilarious scams
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/biggest-kickstarter-and-indiegogo-scams/
Kickstarter is infamous for being full of marketing tech bros who take your money and deliver nothing.
Indegogo is Kickstarter without any of the consumer protections. It's not a matter of if you'll get scammed, but by how much.
Yeah, it was just the crowd funding aspect. I've never used Indie GoGo.
So it goes well with my Cicret bracelet
I'm not disinterested, though $350 is a little steep ($450 if you're not an 'early bird'). Ideally it would be bootloader unlockable and rootable as well. I would probably use it like a PDA of old.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-minimal-phone-first-e-ink-qwerty-phone#/
Preliminary Specs:
- CPU: MTK 6769
- RAM: 4GB
- Storage: 128GB
- OS: Android 13
- Display: 3.5” E-Ink Touch / 300 PPI / High Refresh Rate
- Front Camera: 8MP
- Rear Camera: 16MP
- WIFI: 802.11 a / b / g / n 2.4GHz / 5GHz WiFi Direct，WiFi，B 4.1
- AT＆T: YES
- T-Mobile: YES
- Verizon: YES
- Battery: 4000mAh QC 18W Wireless charge less than 20W
- Features: QWERTY keyboard, NFC, GPS, A-GPS, Fingerprint (side), Face unlock, G sensor, Compass, Gyroscope, Proximity, Light sensor
They can't claim carrier compatibility yet before they even source the parts. (They're in Japan right now sourcing Chinese parts, allegedly, and only have renders thus far.) Let alone until they have a working prototype to test against fyi.
Carriers may very well not certify the device due to compatibility issues. Or they won't be able to afford the certification process.
The phone still has a 3D printed shell in the video. Doesn’t look promising.
Man, what I really want is a e-ink smart watch....
RIP in peace Pebble
I wish Eric had given us pebble v2 instead of beeper, honestly.
The Garmin Instinct watches have an e-ink like display. I get about 25 days of battery on mine.
I have an old Sony eink one which still works and is perfect
I have a Fossil Hybrid, it's perfect
SQFMI Watchy exists... And has a chinese supplier now which doesn't suck
The community is also active, recently a few from ground up firmwares have appeared
Man, I've been dying to get one ever since a friend told me about em.
While I can get them via Aliexpress, they come with a very minimal case, with the sides exposed. I'm struggling to find anyone selling replacement cases and I don't have access to a 3d printer to make one myself unfortunately.
I'll keep looking though.
I switched from a Pebble Time to a Gaemin Vivoactive 4s. I think it's as close to an eink smart watch as it gets.
Depending on what features you want/need, you can get a used Pebble on eBay and run Rebble on it. More hoops to jump through if you use an iPhone, but android support is pretty straightforward!
Not sure if they are still available, but after pebble shut down, I got this Chinese watch called amazfit bip. It has a color e-ink display and lasts roughly a week on a full charge.
I was able to sync to my phone using FOSS called gadgetbridge so I didn't have to install sketchy Chinese software on my phone.
This sounded like something I would be excited about but damn we got different ideas of 'low-price'.
This is almost twice as expensive as my moto power was that gives me several days of heavy use or a week of light use on a charge
E-Ink doesn't mix with low price.
R&D, baby
I think my phone was around $1200 when I bought it, so, for me, this is low priced.
I also acknowledge that I bought a flagship Samsung phone. Not everyone does that.
Yee I have a $20 tracfone lol.
325$, how is that low-priced? I've never paid more then 200$ for a phone, I have an s20+ now.
For that price i can get second hand phone with higher specs & colorful screen
Yeah... It is low priced if you look at Apple or Samsung higher end or recent models.... otherwise yes it is expensive.
Why do these phones always miss the mark?
Making a product made to discourage usage is always going to fail. Palm phone had everyone excited because we wanted a good small phone. Instead they made an intentionally bad small phone and wondered why no one wanted it.
I'd get this if it has other messaging apps like Signal, and banking apps...seems like it has android so should be ok. Unfortunately I don't see it hitting the market realistically...
Man, I hope that takes off. Would be great to charge your phone every week or two.
Is anyone using one of the Hisense e-ink phones? How are they?
My partner has an Onyx Boox Palma, which is similar in some ways. It's fast and would be usable as a basic smartphone if it could take a SIM card. Despite the display being one of the best it is ultimately still e-ink and has many downsides if you are trying to use it like you would a normal smartphone. The ideal target market for this kind of device is really people that have already cut down their screen time and can comfortably live without most things, but still want the option to install any application if necessary.
If you want a more conventional smartphone experience, the TCL NXTPAPER devices may be a better alternative, though they obviously have their own downsides as they do not have true e-ink displays.
$350
Low price
I could go get a new Motorola from Walmart for $69 right now.
The 69 dollar phone is a subsidized pre paid device. They plan on taking a loss on the sale and making it up with cell plans.
Also this is a niche device for a VERY niche audience. It will never be cheap cheap, just cheap for what it is.
Fun fact that's actually how I got my top-of-the-line phone for free. I went in for a new phone&plan and we negotiated a good plan that worked for me, one that came included with a phone. When it came time to close the deal they go into the back and get me a phone. It's a crappy hand-me-down, so naturally I ask if they have any other options. There were two more options each one took them longer to come back from and each one being pretty much the same thing. I ask if they have anything better and they go back and grab an Iphone which I declined because I don't fuck with apple. They take the phone, very quickly put it away, then walk right up to the rack, picked one of their best phones and handed it to me. I smiled and accepted.
Because they're salespeople paid on commission, I was able to game the system to effectively rob the store of an expensive product and the most fucked up thing about that whole situation is that everyone involved still made more money off of me in the long term than if I walked. We really need nationalized communications utilities because the whole thing is just so ridiculous.
Jokes on them, I use them as disposable GPS tracking devices.
Nice
Giggity.
If it came with a good terminal app I would be very tempted. I loved my blackberry and the old slide androids.
"Minimal"
At the software level, the Minimal Phone is based on a customized version of Android 13 and uses the MediaTek MT6769 SoC. It has 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. The front camera has a resolution of 8 MP and the main camera 16 MP, of which the latter comes with flash. Bluetooth and WiFi for both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands are supported. NFC, GPS and a side-mounted fingerprint sensor are also included, as are a compass and gyroscope.
A fingerprint sensor? 16 MP camera? This is just a regular phone with a worse display. The 2009 BlackBerry Tour had 128MB of RAM and a 3.2 MP camera, and it was high end. I realize there just isn't a market anymore for a device that doesn't have these features that could be priced under $400, but it really speaks to a lack of imagination in the industry.
Also even if the prototype in the video is fully functional, they are not gonna have these delivered by August this year with a $500k goal lmao.
Yeah, it was interesting, some of the comments here mentioned the price as being too high, I looked at the price and immediately thought "this is going to be vaporware"
I wish I could get a tablet that is like the ReMarkable tablet with more storage (at least 64GB, storage is dirt cheap these days) or a MicroSD slot. I'm not paying $400 for a tablet with 8GB of storage in 2024. For comparison, you could buy 8TB of SSD storage for that price.
This is interesting but not quite what I want.
How long does the battery last? I think a week minimum and preferably a month it's what would be needed to make it worth it.
"several days"
So the same as most other modern phones under light use.
I have an e-ink notebook. The low refresh rate is intolerable for doing anything like menus or text input.
I like the idea of a minimal phone but I think e-ink is a deal breaker for me, and I suspect most others.
I wish I could just keep using a GSM/CDMA phone from 20 years ago indefinitely sometimes.
Somewhere (and it keeps moving) is a small pile of cellphones that I haven't gotten around to getting rid of. Every few years I'll do some cleaning/rearranging and stumble across an old Motorola Razor flip phone and I kinda miss it.
The size and weight were good. Solid construction (dropped the thing a few times and it took the fall like a champ). Doesn't do smart phone stuff, but hey, there was enough memory that it could store some audio files and simple text files.
Permanently Deleted
If this was like $150, I'd definitely buy one
Looks interesting, I wonder what kind of OS it's running.
It's running android 13 according to their Indiegogo page.
Oh, this looks even more interesting then. If it has an unlocked bootloader, I might actually consider it.
So it's not even out, but already outdated.
the Minimal Phone is based on a customized version of Android 13
Would've preferred a version of this with a replaceable battery and no rear camera.
What's the point of a phone with worse display and worse specs, and that costs more than my £250 Motorola G73?
It's not a "worse" display. It's a different display. The only point is that if you want an e-ink phone (either for readability or battery life) this is one of the only options. Assuming it actually launches at least.