How many times have you tried working using your phone only to be sucked into the bottomless pit of social media? Don’t be shy to admit it. It happens to the best of us. If you do, then I think it is time to call for a minimal distraction phone which is what The Minimal Phone is all about.
For starters, it is an e-ink phone and it has a built-in QWERTY keyboard like the good’ol Blackberry. E-ink plus physical keyboard means serious business with minimal distraction. Not only that. E-ink display is easy on your eyes so you don’t need to sacrifice your eyes’ health as you pore through the million-dollar contract.
E-ink also brings about an important boon for productivity users: it consumes less power, helping in extending the battery life per charge—even though it only has a modest 3,000 mAh battery.
The Minimal Phone has a 4.3-inch e-ink display with a 4:3 aspect ratio for optimal viewing and it packs 230 ppi for easy readability. The screen takes up about 2/3 of the device front real estate. The remaining is mostly occupied by the keyboard.
The physical QWERTY keyboard has a 35-key layout that includes 1 hotkey. It touts comfortable typing with a 74 mm width while a .015 mm key travel provides a tactile and precise experience.
The Minimal Phone is as good as any other Android phone but with no colors to distract you from what you need to be doing. It has full Android access, letting you download any app as you would with any regular Android smartphone. Like a true productivity-focused phone, it has expandable storage and it is dual SIM too.
Rounding up the feature list is a curated suite of productivity apps minus the bloatware to get you started without, ermmm, the bloat.
Other spec sheet details include a 6 nm process MediaTek Helio G99 SoC with octacore processor and ARM Mali-G57 MC2 GPU, MediaTek APU 2.0 AI processing unit, 6 GB of LPDDR4X RAM, 128 GB storage, support T-Flash card for expandable storage, a 16 MP AF rear-facing camera, a 5 MP front-facing camera, NFC with support for Google Pay, 4G LTE radio, Bluetooth 5.2 BLE, GPS, Wi-Fi 5, supports Qi 15 W wireless charging, side-mounted fingerprint sensor, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, USB Type-C interface, built-in speaker, dual microphone, and the usual suspect of sensors like 3-axis G-sensor, proximity sensor, gyroscope, et cetera.
If anyone’s down, The Minimal Phone E-Ink Smartphone is available for pre-order at a special price of US$399 (U.P. US$499) with delivery beginning September 2004.
Images: The Minimal Company.