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This is one awful phone.
If youāre reading this waaaay later, it might have become good, just as Light and Punkt eventually improved. But itās not now.
Iāve used this as my one and only phone for six months.
And since itās so unusable, that has meant pretty much emergencies & delivieries only.
Any real conversations Iāve had to have over email and Jitsi (which means being at home since I donāt have Internet on the go). Not that thatās necessarily a bad setup. The promise of being able to disconnect was the whole point of the phone.
There are some problems which make this thing an unfriendly complete pain.
Itās crashy, freezy, gets into weird states, drops calls, borks up text messages, loses text messages, gets disconnected from the network, makes me not being able to call, while still sometimes calls me even though I have airplane mode on. I tried to use the alarm once, it didnāt go off. Then embarrasingly it did go off at that time but 24 hours later. This thing is not gonna be good in an emergency situation. Turning it on, or off, unlocking it, going to the menu etc is all a stressful, slow, crashy, freezy, unreliable activity.
It seems that the bad battery life was a software issue because itās better now. The four arrow keys (especially down) and the center button are horrible to useāI hear this is fixed on newer phones. The audio quality is ridiculously bad. Itās the biggest phone Iāve ever had, which for something I spend 99.999% of my time not using, is asking for a lot of real estate. Donāt get me wrong; if calls and texts had been nice, like, if audio quality had been good, I wouldnātāve minded this big size. Iāve eyed things like the Hulger or Sqnewton huge retro handsets. But since I hate using this and only keep it for when I absolutely have to, itās dumb that itās this brick. Thisnid an unfair complaint because if everything else worked, or starts working, Iāll be happy with the size.
Listen, as an honorary if not literally āboomerā Iāve had my share of dumbphones. A good dumbphone knows that it has buttons. With a good dumpbphone (i.e. any except this one) I could pick it up, hit ālatest callsā (or contacts or favorites) hardware button, hit up and down or a number 1 through 9 to select a call or person, hit call and weāre off to the races. Ditto texts. On the Pure, though, itās as if the UI was as a Macintosh with arrow keys. Itās made by someone from the age of touch but without touch. To get to calls or contacts or text messages, I have to move the cursor to the right icon (and it wraps so I canāt even muscle-memory it). Normally, a dumbphone like this pops up and you see nine icons and you can just hit the corresponding number button to select it. Here, itās a cursor-driven nightmare.
And, which is good for muscle-memory and for people who canāt see, on a good design there are full stops. Idempotent states. You go back enough times, youāre at the menu. You go right enough times, youāre at the right edge. You go up enough times, youāre at the top message. But on the Pure, there are no idempotent states, because everything wraps. Everything is fiddly. And the text is for ants.
As a volunteer (ācommunity contributorā) I contributed a little bit to the Mudita Pureās FOSS OS; I mostly did some localization stuff.
Time to review it!
Listen, I donāt want yāall to cancel your preorders. We worked hard on this thing (in my case, only a few weeks, but I followed along and saw how much everyone effort else was putting in). All the following nitpicks aside, this is my main and only phone.
So, Iām coming from a few years of the Doro 5517, which I loved, and a few months of the Doro 7011, which is a horrible phone that I canāt believe they shipped. Thatās the reference here. 3G phones that look like old-style feature ācandybarā phones. Before those two 3G dumb phones, I went through three smartphones, and before those, five GSM dumb phones.
This is a similar phone in many ways; slow (in the Pureās case understandable, because of the e-ink, which is, on the other hand, a huge reason to get this phone. E-ink is e-ink, for good and bad), similar navigation/button layout, stripped-down feature phone.
The round buttons, like those ābarā context specific keys and the number/letter keys, all feel great. Easily the best improvement compared to those Doro feature phones.
The navigation directions not so much, are tiny, difficult to use (and thatās with mittens off!), and for the first couple of days, when I hit down thereās a loud creak, a long sound as the frame slowly and creakily pops back into place. That problem went away after a while.
Kind of confusing menu systemāas I was doing the set up wizard I accidentally hit finish as I was trying to set it to 24h time instead of 12h time.
Iām constantly hitting the wrong button, usually hitting the center key when I mean the left context key; I expect the center key to do what I want but it instead doesnāt.
For people my own age who remember when computers were point&click, itās sort of an OS that needs a three button mouse, and where the semantics about whatās left click, middle click, right click is really mixed up.
The problem is this:
Currently, the center key usually means ādo it to itā. Itās what you click to go to whateverās under the cursor in the app menu, for example. When there are two things, ādo a small thing to this specific widgetā and āfinalize the entire thing, the message, the contact, the settingā, the center key is the big thing and the left context key is the small, local thing. In my opinion, thatās backwards. Instead, I wouldāve wanted the center key to be the small, local thing and the left context key to be the big thing.
Why? Because what the current behaviour means in practice is that thereās gonna be a lot of prematurely sent text messages, saved contacts, saved settings. The center key is what you use to click around and do small things normally when there isnāt a ābig thingā, so you get used to it doing small things such as entering apps.
And then when there suddenly is a big thing (like āsend the messageā), the center-key is co-opted to do the big thing while the left context key does the small, local thing. Can I get used to the current UI? Sure. (Thatās why Iām writing this down now, when the problem is still fresh in my mind.)
There is an autolock setting, deep in the settings menu hierarchy, where you can set an autolock time from fifteen seconds up to twenty minutes, but you canāt turn off autolock. To lock it manually, this isnāt obvious at all, but the way you do it is by holding the # key (when youāre not in a text input field). I usually donāt want autolock on when Iām at home but I usually do want the phone to be locked while itās in my purse.
I love holding it. Holding it just makes me happy. They describe it as āinspired by the shape of a stoneā, which sounded weird since stones and rocks are all kinds of shapes, but, a beach pebble worn smooth by the ocean, is what it is. I love it. However, as with many phones, the āthe phone is a slippery bar of soapā factor is pretty big, Iāve almost dropped it three times already and Iāve only had it a few hours.
The speaker, for ring tones and SMS tones, is awful and most of the ring tones and text tones are very clipped and distorted because of that. During phone calls, sound quality is horrible for both me and for the other person. Easily the worst feature of the phone. It comes out of the box crankes up to the highest volume, and, like most speakers, sounds a little bit better and less clippy if you lower the volume a bit. But then itās too quiet.
Most of the SMS tones are really long. You get a ton of text messages and thereās a little song for each one. I chose one of the shortest ones (a kinda harsh guitar chord strum). I havenāt figured out how to add custom tones for calls and messages. Maybe thatās gonna be done with the Electron app.
You canāt have contact-specific tones.
It has a vibration mode which I disabled since I hate phones that vibrate (especially for a flat-bottom phone like this one, that Iād love to set down flat on a desk); thatās a waste of space in the phone for the motor. Thankfully you can disable vibration for calls, messages, and alarm. (If youāre wondering how to change the alarm tune, itās in the alarm app itself.)
I love that the context keys light up red and green during a call, thatās a great feature actually! Super relaxing and makes it less stressful, less risk of hitting the wrong key.
The huge size is comfortable when talking. I still think the screen is too big. The font is tiny and squint-inducing, and thereās a lot of empty white space in the UI. To see if you have any unread text messages, itās the tiniest of tiny dots in the corner of the tiny little āenvelopeā icon on the main menu. Unread messages also show up on the main screen, under the time and date. Iāll keep an eye out whether they are also visible when the phone is locked.
The buttons are OK sized. The phone does fit in my purse if I squeeze it in, itās a tight fit.
There is no way to get to the main menu from a deep sub menu or app, you need to go back step by step. That may sound like a minor thing but for low-vision users, itās necessary to consistently be able to ā¢ āgo back to neutralā. Only workaround is to jam the back key many many times and then hit the center key to get to the menu. This is especially an issue since the navigation keyboard wraps around.
The main menu is a 3 by 3 grid of icons; on some similar phones Iāve then also been able to hit the corresponding number key to open that app. Not here. That wouldāve been especially good in low-vision situations.
When the phone is locked and someone else wants to find my ICE-contacts, thatās a pretty fiddly and cumbersome UX if youāre not used to the Pureās idiosyncratic three-context-button setup and e-ink delay. Itās even harder to find the ICE contacts when itās unlocked.
You set the meditation timer to 15 or 30 or 60 or 90 with the directional keys, or use the keypad to set it to a specific time. It also doesnāt save your meditation settings, I need to turn off āchime every 2 minutesā every time. You can turn off the meditation prematurely by hitting the right context key, labeled āstopā.
I canāt change the text message templates (āIāll call you in five minutesā and such) on the device itself.
I want to try to test the Electron app, hopefully I can change the message templates in there, I just, uh, I need to get a new cable for that since my desktop computer doesnāt have any USB C ports. Thatās also where I hope to update the music.
It comes with a handful of Nick Lewis songs (the headphone speakers sound OK) but those arenāt tagged with metadata (either that or, the song browser doesnāt work properly; the songs only show up under āall songsā).
I miss incoming text messages while listening to music or when Iām on a call.
The text entry works like this. Thereās no T9, you just hit the āJKLā button three times if you want an L, for example. So if you want to write the word ābadā, you hit ABC twice to get the first ābā, then wait a bit (you donāt get a visual cue and thereās no setting to adjust the delay) and hit it once more for the āaā, then you hit the DEF key once for the ādā.
The number/letter keys are way better quality than either the Doro 5517 and the Doro 7011. On both of those, thereās a pain if you wanna capitalize a letter mid sentence, but here itās easy enough; the lower-left key (marked *) toggles between ABC, abc, and 123. Thereās no attempt at an āAbcā mode (capitalize next letter). Thatās both good and bad. Itās bad because capitalizing one letter is a common need, itās good because the fact that thereās only three modes makes it faster to toggle through.
The speaker is a bit too high, for shoulder-ear-pinch mode (the way we did handsfree in the seventies), in other words, if you pinch the phone between your shoulder and ear where the sound is the clearest, the phone will slip out because the speaker is placed so distally from the center of the phone.
Itās great that you can assign notes to contacts; great place to put door keypad codes.
Sometimes text is truncated (for example, but not limited to, in the message templates) and I donāt know how to scroll it.
I like that I can turn off the backlight completely and just have a pure, unlit e-ink. That makes the phone feel more like a physical object, a part of my home like a pen or notebook, than a ādigital magical endless attention grabberā.
The three things a phone need to do:
Less essential stuff:
This phone is successful at its main goal: being un-addictive.ā„
Iām overall happy with it and hope itāll last me for a long, long time.ā„
Getting feedback that the āreview is horridā. Donāt shoot the messenger!
I tried to write an honest and thorough review.
And, thanks to this phone, I can receive deliveries and call the doctor. It works.
Donāt get stuff that you donāt want. Obviously. Thatās pretty key to a simple life. If you donāt wanna buy it, donāt buy it. If itās not gonna spark joy for you, donāt get it.
It makes me happy and Iām proud of it.
Itās pretty much the only simple, open source, 3G phone that I know of. Thereās nothing like it. Pine Phone, Fairphone? Not simple. Light Phone, Punkt? Not open source. Retro phones? Not open source nor can they handle 3G.
Iām getting sick of the awful call quality (sounds like a rabid drowning modem) and the missed calls.