Minimal: Dreaming of a Phone that Does Less

 
By doing less than conventional smartphones, the Minimal Phone (on top) and a few others, like the Light Phone III, Hisense A9 Pro and Nokia 2780 Flip promise to give you back your life. I want the Minimal Phone now!

Much as I hate to admit it, my life has been taken over by my smartphone. I’m a slave to an innocuous, 6.5-inch slab of glass and metal. It’s a pocketable supercomputer that allows me to make phone calls (both voice and video calls), access emails, take photographs and instantly share those with whoever I want to, send and receive text messages, photos and videos, make and receive payments instantly (I hardly ever carry cash these days), do all my online shopping, help me navigate across the city, book cabs, flights and hotel rooms… the list is endless. The sheer range of things that a modern smartphone will allow you to do is nothing short of astonishing.

I was a tech journalist until the early-2000s and used to write about computers and technology. This was 25 years ago and if someone had suggested at that time that there would, in the future, be a small, pocketable device – a 'smartphone' – that would allow you to do all of what I’ve mentioned above, I would have probably thought the idea quite preposterous. After all, I was still going to a PCO (anyone remember those?) to make international calls in the early-1990s, when I was in Bareilly. By the late-1990s I had moved to Bombay, started working as tech writer for CHIP magazine and subsequently started using a Nokia 5110, my very first mobile phone. Making and receiving calls was still prohibitively expensive back then, and I used that phone sparingly. Gradually, call rates dropped over the years and the ancient 5110 was replaced by the sleek little Nokia 8210, but usage was still restricted to only making and receiving phone calls, and sending and receiving text messages.

The first ‘smartphone’ that I bought was a Samsung Galaxy Pop, which I believe was one of the first few Android smartphones to come to India. I bought this in 2010 for my wife, and the phone cost Rs 10,000 or thereabouts. Moving from a basic feature phone to the Galaxy Pop, my wife initially struggled to come to terms with this Android-powered device but was completely hooked within a month and has never looked back since. As for myself, I remained loyal to basic feature phones right up until mid-2014, when I finally gave in and got a Nokia Lumia 1020, a Windows-powered device that had a 41-megapixel camera and took brilliant photographs. The phone cost Rs 37,000 back in 2014, which was very expensive by my standards, but I got the phone for its ability to take great photographs. I needed a good camera at that time and, for a while, considered getting a Sony RX100 (the 1^st generation RX100 had just been launched about a year ago), which cost about the same as the Lumia 1020, but the latter won out in the end because I thought it might be more practical to carry the Nokia wherever I went.

A month or two later, after that purchase, the company I was working for at the time gave me some high-end Blackberry phone (I don’t remember the exact model name/number etc.) on which I could access my official email. That was, I think, the beginning of the end – the end of life as I knew it in the pre-smartphone era. Company email being accessible on the phone gave rise to the idea that employees must be connected 24x7 and should/must respond to emails at all times of the day and night. The concept of working from nine in the morning to six in the evening went out of the window. The world went mad, checking work emails at two or three in the morning, and replying to those right then and there, immediately. I don’t know if this was really in the interests of boosting efficiency or a desperate attempt to show to our bosses how loyal, hard-working and committed we were to the company. Whatever the case might be, it snowballed and today, in most workplaces (though not all) there’s scant respect for one’s personal time and space.

Towards the end of 2016, after having used the Lumia 1020 for more than two years, I was looking to change my phone and after some deliberation, got the Android-powered OnePlus 3T, which turned out to be an excelled device. Its abilities, when it came to photography, were nowhere near the old Lumia’s, but in every other area, including the apps ecosystem, battery life and display, the 3T was ahead by miles. I’ve been inextricably hooked to Android smartphones since then and today, in 2024, I’m using a Motorola G54, which is running Android 14. It’s a somewhat basic, Rs 15,000 phone that’s still pretty capable – it can do anything that phones ten times as expensive can do, except of course that it can’t take photographs as well as a Rs 1.50 lakh Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and has no AI capabilities as such. That, however, is not a problem for me. The problem is, I think I spend way too much time with my G54, scrolling endlessly through YouTube shorts, checking email, LinkedIn and WhatApp messages, and browsing random websites via the Google news feed. I don’t have an Instagram account, don’t use Twitter, deleted Facebook from my phone ages ago and have turned off all notifications, but I still end up spending way too much time on the phone – time that I could perhaps otherwise have used in more useful, productive work.

While my smartphone addiction is probably not as bad as it might be for many others, it’s still a huge waste of time and I often think about how I can reclaim my life from that damn phone. Going back to a very basic feature phone is probably not an option, because smartphones have some essential features that I simply can’t do without anymore. These include the ability to make and receive payments via UPI, check and respond to WhatsApp and Gmail, Google maps for navigation, and the ability to book a cab and a basic camera that can at least scan QR codes etc. These, I believe, are non-negotiable and a phone that doesn’t have any one or more of these features will not do. But everything else I can do without, including YouTube and all social media apps.

I want a phone that will give me back my life and the only way that’ll happen is if I can get a phone that does less than what most modern smartphones are easily capable of, but still enough to let me get on with my life with a bunch of essential apps, as described above. What is the solution to this problem? I honestly don’t know. Like I said, going back to regular feature phones is not an option, given their severely limited capabilities. So what else is there? I suppose I’m not the only one clamouring for simpler phones, because now there are some companies that are at least trying to make phones that offer a simpler, lighter user experience as compared to regular smartphones. Some of these include the Minimal Phone, the Light Phone III, the Hisense A9 Pro and the Nokia 2780 Flip. (Some might say there’s also the Boox Palma, but that only looks like a phone but actually isn’t one, since it won’t let you make or receive phone calls!) Now, each of these phones has its own set of capabilities and limitations, some have E Ink displays, and none is available in India. Yet. But I’m still seriously thinking of getting a friend or an acquaintance – someone who may be travelling to the US – to get one of these phones for me.

Right now, the Minimal Phone, priced at $399 (Rs 33,400) in the US, is looking very attractive and will likely give me everything I genuinely need and nothing that I don’t want. At 4.3 inches, it’s the perfect size, the black-and-white E Ink display should give it perfect readability, and the 3,000mAh battery should be more than enough for at least two full days of usage. The phone runs Android 14 and has access to the Google play store, so getting my essential apps shouldn’t be a problem, and using the old-style QWERTY physical keyboard should be fun. And, I know I won’t miss YouTube and social media apps like LinkedIn etc.

The Light Phone III also looks very interesting but won’t let me make UPI payments or access email or WhatsApp, which won’t work for me. I love the Nokia 2780 Flip but, again, KaiOS has its own well-known set of limitations and the phone may or may not be able to run some essential apps that I really do need in my regular, day-to-day life. The Hisense A9 Pro is too uncomfortably close to a conventional Android smartphone, while the Boox Palma isn’t a phone at all, even though it sort of looks like one.

I love the Minimal Phone and want to get one. Now let’s see if I can find someone who can get one for me, from the US :-D

Also see: The Mind-Boggling Complexity of Buying a Phone in 2024