I’m curious the problem you feel like it’s fixing for you. Not a criticism, I just don’t quite understand it.
E-Paper display? Way better battery life.
SD Card slot and headphone jack? Physical QWERTY keyboard?
All these features speak for themselves. Prolly not the best phone for gamers, but I'm pretty sure OP doesn't much care for gaming anyways.
Well I might be coming from the opposite direction as most. I found myself really distracted with my iPhone when I was out of the house which prompted the move to a dumbphone in 2023. I still used an iPhone at home for web browsing and whatnot.
Over the years, I got frustrated by certain small features that some apps could bring me such as the ability to set my home alarm system or check the location of EV chargers with PlugShare. So I needed some kind of smarterphone and Minimal checked the box.
I'd say that the real benefit of the phone is that the e-paper screen makes it hard to do anything heavily interactive. Scrolling a feed is difficult and watching a video or playing a game is downright out. Yet the keyboard makes sending messages trivial. I was worried moving to a full featured phone that I'd need to remove the web browser to keep me from doom scrolling somewhere, but that's not really a temptation.
Also, if you turn the backlight off entirely, it becomes a really boring object to look at and I don't find myself reaching for it out of instinct. Even checking a message in a dark bar I find myself leaning towards the nearest light source rather than enabling the backlight. Reading books with KOReader in full sunlight is great too.
It has just enough capability to function as a communication or reading device without much else, and it's enabled me to completely stop using my iPhone at home. If I need a full web interface, I get out of bed/off the couch, and move to my PC.
tl;dr: The screen makes it hard to perform passive activities like doom scrolling while the keyboard makes messaging easy.
Can it run e/OS or GrapheneOS?
From the looks of it, no.
Relevant thread:
Well that's a bummer. I'd be all in if so.
I have the Sunbeam F1 Pro and very very happy with it. How do you rate the minimal phone compared to the Sunbeam you had? The main problem I see is that it looks like you have to use their plan instead of the carrier of your choice.
Nope. I literally popped the SIM out of the sunbeam and into Minimal. They do offer a plan (and I even got a sim card in the mail without asking), but you don't have to use it.
My biggest gripe with the Sunbeam was how insanely slow the T9 was. Texting was a total slog. I don't know if that's everyone's experience, I had a theory that my huge contact list was bogging down the predictive text, but I can't confirm that. Anyway, I'd have to wait a solid half second between keystrokes to keep from missing keypresses. And when you miss a keypress in T9, you basically have to completely delete the word as it's impossible to figure out which letter you got wrong. Oh, and for some reason, it would always suggest names over very common words. Like "Cox" instead of "any."
That and I spilled beer on it so the bottom half of the touch screen doesn't work despite completely dismantling and cleaning it out.
I'll say I liked the size and shape of the Sunbeam and I really liked being able to navigate menus without a touch screen. It was also a great conversation piece. But other than that, it was just too limited. I needed a few apps to get by. I also found it annoying how there was no easy way to send photos from it that I took with my Ricoh camera. And I can't view videos that people send me? Why not? Gifs work!
The Minimal phone is hella buggy at the moment, but it's already better than a lot of early review units I've read about, so I assume it'll all get fixed in due time. Most annoying at the moment is that it takes like a full second to sleep, and if you so much as tap the screen during that second, it wakes right back up again. Oh, and auto-caps first word of the sentence on the keyboard also capitalizes the first letter of any password you're entering. The only work around I've found is to type the first letter twice and delete the first one. I have auto caps turned off for that reason.
Glad to know the Minimal doesn't force you to use their own network--the website kind of implied that was the only choice. The eInk screen is the feature I would find most appealing about it, since it would eliminate the need for a separate ebook reader, but I don't think they're quite there yet in terms of speed so I'll wait until someone finally solves that problem. The keyboard would be fun to have too.
Yes, Sunbeam's no videos thing seems weird, which is too bad since video would actually be usable on the Pro model with its much better camera resolution than most other flip phones' basically useless cameras. I guess it's something to do with their goal of minimizing distractions.
As for texting, I don't use T9 input for that (I do use it for some other things)--one of the main reasons I went for the Sunbeam was that it had the other input options. I always use the touch screen keyboard for texting now. I was worried it wouldn't be very good because of the small screen size and was prepared to have to use the dictation app, but I was surprised how well and fast I can type on it in landscape orientation so I didn't need to use dictation--even though it worked well when I tried it out.
Smartphones dominate the world. But have we become smarter by using them?
This community is oriented for people who prefer either so-called "dumbphones" or "feature phones" in order to regain control of their life.
Here is a very simple set of rules to follow:
All in all, enjoy your time here :D