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.
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.
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.
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’m just annoyed that they sell uncomplicated phones, but they are always hundreds of dollars. Just put an eink screen on a cheap SOC price around $40.
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.
Not the same. E-ink displays only require power when you turn on the backlight or things change on the screen. The screen on time should be higher compared to regular LCD/OLED panels.
My Galaxy S3 lasted About a month one charge as alarm clock, until the battery gave out a few weeks ago. The Poco 1 lasts about a week, despite having more capacity. Standby power got worse the last 10 years.
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…
I wonder how hard it would be to open source something similar with something like an nrf52 or similar and a 3d printed enclosure I might have to look into this tbh
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.
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.
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!
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