Bad news, gamers. Brain rot is real.
Social media and their funky algorithms have screwed everything up. But
thankfully, some people are starting to realize this. And that's why all of
these nonsmartphones, dumb phones, if you will, minimalist
phones, have sprouted up with what they
say might be a solution to that problem. A phone you don't like using. It's
counterintuitive. We've covered a couple of these on the channel. I think Lionus
did the Light Phone 3 which had a OLED display but it made a mistake that a lot
of these dumb phone makers are making which is thinking that in order to get
people to use their phones less you need to take away functionality from the
actual phone. The minimal phone
takes a different approach. You can do almost everything on this phone that you
do on a regular smartphone. It just kind of sucks, which might be what you want
if you're going for a product like this. So, let's take a look at it before we
take the look at the phone at itself. Let's see what's in the box. Got a SIM
card tool, a only 10 watt charger. This
thing is probably not going to suck up a lot of battery uh with an e- in display.
I think it's only got a 3000 mAh battery, which is pretty small, but also
10 watts is pretty slow these days. We'll see what the Labs data says about
that. Also a USBC cord about four feet
as they tend to be. And is that it? This
is what there's a skin in the box. Dbrand. This is a Dbrand skin because
Minimal they did a collaboration with Dbrand uh to offer Dbrand skins. Right
now these are only available on Minimal's website and not on Dbrand's
website. And that is all that's in the box. Uh let's move to the device itself.
Now, you may have noticed this thing has a physical keyboard on the front. That's
because with an e- in display, you're probably not going to have a great
typing experience. They're not known for their uh fast refresh rates and like
responsive touchcreens. So, uh having an uh included hardware keyboard is pretty
nice. But let's look at the actual rest of the device. So on the front here, we
got a 4.3 in 4x3 aspect ratio, e-
paperer display, 600 by 800 resolution.
We got a home button, back button, multitasking button. We'll get into
that. On this side, we have the power button, which also doubles as a
fingerprint reader. I haven't uh set that up yet, but we will. On the top, we
have nothing else except for the mic, one of the mics. Anyway, on the right
side of the phone, we have kind of an interesting arrangement here. We have the volume up, volume down, and in the
middle is a refresh button for the
screen. So, as we're using the screen, uh, it's going to be ghosting a little
bit, e- in. Uh, and that'll just do a manual refresh, like, uh, shaking an
etch a sketch to like clear it or whatever. And then up at the top here,
we have a dual SIM card tray that doubles as a micro SD card slot. You
don't see that anymore. On the bottom, another interesting assortment of ports.
We got a USBC port, speaker, the other
mic, and a headphone jack, 3.5 mm. We
got micro SD card slots, dual SIM cards, 3.5 mil jack. Like, what? This is why
it's so nice to cover hardware made by passionate people who are like creating
a very intentional device instead of just like the big stuff from the big
giant tech conglomerates. They don't care about you. They're trying to rot
your brain. On the back, we have a plastic pretty fingerprint magnety uh
surface there, which is kind of too bad, but there's a camera there and flash.
And also, you can't see it, but I happen to know there's wireless charging
support in the back here as well. So, that's nice to see. And one thing I
totally forgot to mention while I was looking at the front here is that the
selfie camera is way down in the corner here. So, it's nice to see it has a
selfie camera. On a like a e- in phone like this, you might even expect that
they would just drop that. a strange placement for it. We'll find out if that
uh feels weird. Okay, let's find out what it's like to use this thing. Let's
get minimal and do a minimally intrusive
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QR code on screen to get started. All right, let the minimalizing
begin. interacting with this is, you
know, based on normal kind of swipe gestures like any other Android phone. I
mean, the the difference is that it's running a custom Android skin on top of
Android 14. We have a home screen here with just words uh instead of icons, but
all of those lead to the actual apps. I know that some of the other phones have
like custom versions of all these apps. Like the Light Phone 3 has restrictions.
They didn't have Google Maps. They had their own kind of map service, but this
has maps, messages, and notes, but notes
is Google Keep. Maps is Google Maps. And what what what screen refresh rate am I
in? This is I can I can barely see
anything. And right away, I feel like we
are running into the issue here. You need maps. Quick settings, though, is
something different. So, this is Let's familiarize ourselves with these before
we get too deep because this is how you're going to customize your
experience with this display. There's a brightness slider up top. Labs measured
the max brightness on this top slider, which is like the blue backlight. Uh,
that goes up to 124 nits. And then you can get with the orange backlight, it
gets even brighter up to 351. That's important. You can customize the
kind of color and brightness of the display. You can have a max blue
backlight and then you can change how warm it is. Oh, and this slider down
here is the uh keyboard backlight. And then down here you got some presets. So
if you want to quickly make it fire hot
or cold cold or uh more of a nighttime
sleepy mode, I made this uh custom mode.
So you can select custom, move things around, and then hold actually if I want
to make that brighter. And then you hold the wrench, and that locks in that
custom preset. So then you can switch to that again quickly. And then down at the
bottom, we got refresh speed. So each of these sections has this handy little
info uh thing you can bring up. You got slow, ultra, and in the middle, you got
hybrid, which tries to adapt to the
content you're looking at on screen. Because yes, it's Android. You can play
videos. You can play games if you really
want to. You shouldn't want to, but you know, I'm not going to judge. I'm going
to leave it on slow for now. We can get back to this screen by holding the
refresh, the manual refresh button. That'll bring it back at any time. So,
that's handy. That's our home screen. Swiping up gets you your full list of
apps, which is again is just a regular list. It's not like a grid or anything.
And uh you know, you got all the the apps that you could want on here. If you
really really really really need a fix for something that you can only get on a
normal Android phone, you can get it through Google Play. And as you can see,
you know, even in the slow mode, just scrolling through stuff isn't the worst.
Like that's this is more than usable. Uh if you scroll super fast, that might get
a little bit confusing, but if you're reading or reading, it should be fine.
Okay, so that's the basics of the display. Let's check out this keyboard.
I'm going to write a little note here. So, open Google Keep, which is called
notes. And wait, what is the part of the
plus sign is missing. I wonder what that's about. While doing some research
on this phone, I saw some people complaining about the pixel density of
this display. It's only 800 by 600 and it's e- paper. It's not even like e in
branded the offic like cuz e- in is like an an entity. It's a third party thing.
And they had some complaints about how, you know, really small stuff can be kind
of hard to see on this display. But I'm
confused about this. Like, why is it just taking out? As I clicked on it, it
it appeared. Can I I can't zoom in on it. So, I guess be aware that some UI
elements uh might just not be there. I guess I don't that that's kind of
strange. But anyways, let's type something. Can I do a haiku? makes
me love phones. Typing is bliss.
Typing is bless. Yeah, I like that better. Is that only four? What? Um,
that wasn't fun. Uh, but that's because I think I just haven't had enough time
like getting used to this. I will say that the keys are nice and clicky. I did
like if I if I just like button mash for a second and pretend I know how to type.
Yeah, that feels good. From what I can see, people who have been using this
phone do like the keyboard. It just will it'll take some getting used to if you
haven't used a physical keyboard in a while. I can't stop focusing on this
camera down there. I need to find out. I need to find out what that's about.
Camera activate. Okay. Okay. Interesting. We're in the slow refresh
rate mode right now because it's like Oh, no. We're in the fast mode. Oh,
okay. What does it look like in slow mode? I hit the multitasking button.
It's got the same old Android Oh. Oh, it's got the same old Android
multitasking interface, but you can see, ooh, in slow refresh rate mode, this is
not It doesn't want you to do this. It's stopping you. It's stopping you from
from wanting to use your phone. It's not stopping you from doing the things you
need to do. It's just making you not want to do anything else. Oh, wow. Look
at that. Okay, wait. I'll try to hold it as as still as I can. Well, let's take a
camera. Let's take a picture there. So, this is a 16 megapixel camera. It does
take in full color. It doesn't take full like monochrome uh pictures or anything.
Um 16 megapixels, you know, it's not going to be amazing. This front selfie
camera is 5 megapixels. Does it have the camera shortcut? It does. Okay. Double
clicking power goes to camera. So, that's nice to know. And we're back to
doing this crazy thing. Sometimes slow mode can't handle uh you know, high
refresh rate uh in the camera app, but sometimes it can. Okay. in high in high
refresh rate mode. Yes, it's it's
keeping up. You can you can use the viewfinder well enough to figure out
what you're looking at. Okay, let's do a selfie. See, like I'm It's funny. I'm
expecting the camera to be up here, but the camera is down in the corner.
Oh, that's a horrible photo. And I'm sure it'll look even worse in the full
color version. But like you see, like that's kind of a fun like effect. Maybe
I want to look at all my photos like this. Wow. It's a camera. If you really
need to snap a photo of something, you know, they have a camera on there. But
don't pretend like you're going to be posting those to Instagram. Taking a video. This is me taking a video. And I
guess we can hear what the mic is like on this guy. Um, what do you guys think?
Does it sound good? And this is what video is like on the other side. Stop
that.
Um, wow. This is actually looking pretty nice on the actual camera display. I
could vlog like this. Let's go to YouTube. I open YouTube and it goes to
the shorts right away. Oh, it's an ad for Tik Tok. What? How ironic. Hello.
You can't hold it. You can't hold the button to go up. You have to manually
click it all the way up. Also, when I hit the volume, the slider is in the
middle of the screen. He can't see the UI properly.
How do I Okay, I can just guess where the play head was.
You don't need anything more than that. Invite some friends over. Gather around
the minimal phone. But anyways, the speakers are bad. Uh I don't know what
you want me to say. They were going to be bad always. Uh but again, same theme.
You can do it. It's going to suck. you should only use it for a calculator,
calendar, all of these things. You know, it is kind of weird. I didn't talk much
at the beginning about like the kind of a wonky design of this thing like in
general. Like it's got these thick bezels and these like really flat sides
and it's pretty thick for like a smartphone. That's something to
consider. It's It's probably not wider than most phones are these days, but it
is kind of like a strange design. I think it still fits in your pocket
pretty nice. like it's doesn't it doesn't it's it doesn't feel weird in
your pocket. It feels like a normal phone. But there is a certain element of
like when you buy a phone like this, you know, you kind of need to know what
you're getting into. And what you're getting into in terms of performance is
not a lot of it. It's got a MediaTek
Helio G99. Uh it's a 6nm processor that,
you know, no one's ever heard of probably except for you, the person who
recognized it. You got it. And the base model is 128 gigs of storage with 6 gigs
of memory. You can upgrade that to 8 gigs of memory with 256 gigs of storage.
Or like I pointed out earlier, you there's an micro SD card slot. You can
just put in a giant micro SD card if you're ever worried about storage space
on here. And because this does run normal Android and you can do the normal
Android things on it, we had Labs do their normal testing with it. So,
unsurprisingly, Labs found that the minimal phone uh you know, it's just uh
the performance isn't that impressive on Geekbench 6 multi-core. We got 2,000
score compared to 10,000 with the Samsung S25 Ultra and 4500 with the
Pixel 9a. I'm not sure whether they put a weak processor in because they're
like, "Ah, it's in display. You know, you don't need that many resources or whether that was part of their sort of
like willful impedance of your ability to use uh the product." uh you know it's
a feature not a bug. I don't know. Labs did our normal stress test with a like
gaming benchmark and they wrote no thermal throttling but uh this device
doesn't perform enough compute to generate enough heat to throttle. So
gotcha gotcha good. So we got a bit of an interesting result here with the
battery discharge test. Typical performance of modern phones in this
test uh according to Labs they get usually around 16 to 24 hours. This
phone, however, on their website, they say that it has a 4day battery life, but
with our battery discharge, which was playing 1080p video streaming from a
Plex server, it lasted 4 hours and 22 minutes. The whole idea is that you're
not going to be using this for video playback. From what I've seen, uh,
people are using this and it lasts, you know, like a day or more, which is like,
you know, that's what you can expect from modern smartphones. Charging was
also an interesting situation. With the 45 watt charger, it took 144 minutes to
charge. With the 20 watt charger, it took 107 minutes to charge. You're not
going to get like the most crazy uh super quick charging performance out of
this thing. One more note from Labs that I make want to make sure that I get to
here. They signed in with their uh Google account and then when they were
typing, the password for the Labs account showed up in the autofill.
That's something to maybe fix. Minimal phone. Oh, I didn't do the fingerprint
reader real quick. What? Well, it won't let me do a pattern. Oh, it'll let me
start from the top. There's just little janky things like that. You know, it's
not refreshing. So, I can't tell whether I'm making progress or not. It's It's
doing little vibrates, but normally with this graphic, like it's a fingerprint
and it'll like fill out as you add more to it. Oh, it worked. Okay. Wait, let's
unlock it. Okay. I feel like that was a great
little microcosm for this phone. You can
do the things. parts of it are going to suck and then other parts will be just
fine. This situation is just so fascinating to me because here we have
these like amazing devices in our pockets that can literally do
everything. They're Swiss Army knives times a million. We have calculators,
cameras, sensors, wallets like NFC. This
thing has NFC as by the way you can use it like that. We have so many different
tools in our phones. What comes along with that is like being hooked into
these apps that are literally melting our brain and especially melting kids'
brains. We have people kind of trying to address that on like the other side.
They're trying to change social media platforms. They're trying to change regulations, trying to ban phones and
schools. And then the other side, we have people trying to attack it from
this dimension where they're like, "Okay, the portals that you use to get
to that brain rot uh stuff. We have to
take this pipe that you go through and shrink it so you can only go get your
arm through a little bit. Swipe Tik Tok with one finger." It's an analogy. It
works. So, at the end of the day, I like that the minimum phone exists. And it's
actually not as expensive as like a more premium kind of device like the Light
Phone 3. I think that goes for around like 600 bucks. This thing is starting
at $400. I think that's like an early bird price. The upper tier is uh $500.
At $500, you're kind of getting into like, okay, at what point do you decide
you can just have some self-control and turn on monochrome on your regular
Android device and delete apps that you don't want you don't think you should be
using and all that stuff. So, overall, I'm happy that it exists and I'm happy
that you watch this whole video. I like the time that we spend together.
How about we spend some more time? Go check out some of the uh e-aper e- in
tablets I've done.