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Bad news gamers. Brain rot is real. Social media and their funky algorithms have screwed everything up,

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but thankfully some people are starting to realize this and that's why all of these non-smart phones,

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dumb phones if you will, minimalist phones have sprouted up with what they say might be a solution

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to that problem. A phone you don't like using. It's counter-intuitive. We've covered a couple

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of these on the channel. I think Linus did the light phone 3 which had a OLED display,

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but it made a mistake that a lot of these dumb phone makers are making, which is thinking that in

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order to get people to use their phones less, you need to take away functionality from the actual

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phone. The minimal phone, MP01, takes a different approach. You can do almost everything on this

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phone that you do on a regular smartphone. It just kind of sucks, which might be what you want

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if you're going for a product like this. So let's take a look at it before we take the look at the

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phone itself. Let's see what's in the box. We've got a SIM card tool, a only 10 watt charger.

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This thing is probably not going to suck up a lot of battery with an e-ink display. I think it's

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only got a 3000 mAh battery, which is pretty small, but also 10 watts is pretty slow these days.

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We'll see what the lab's data says about that. Also a USB-C cord about four feet as they tend to be.

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And is that it? This is what? There's a skin in the box. Dbrand. This is a Dbrand skin because

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Minimal, they did a collaboration with Dbrand to offer Dbrand skins. Right now, these are only

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available on Minimal's website and not on Dbrand's website. And that is all that's in the box.

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Let's move to the device itself. Now you may have noticed this thing has a physical keyboard on the

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front. That's because with an e-ink display, you're probably not going to have a great typing

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experience. They're not known for their fast refresh rates and like responsive touch screens.

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So having an included hardware keyboard is pretty nice. But let's look at the actual

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rest of the device. So on the front here, we got a 4.3-inch 4x3 aspect ratio e-paper display,

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600x800 resolution. We've got a home button, back button, multitasking button. We'll get into that.

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On this side, we have the power button, which also doubles as a fingerprint reader. I haven't

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set that up yet, but we will. On the top, we have nothing else except for the mic. One of the mics,

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anyway. On the right side of the phone, we have kind of an interesting arrangement here. We have

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the volume up, volume down, and in the middle is a refresh button for the screen. So as we're using

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the screen, it's going to be ghosting a little bit, e-ink, and that'll just do a manual refresh,

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like shaking an etch-a-sketch to like clear it or whatever. And then up at the top here,

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we have a dual SIM card tray that doubles as a micro SD card slot. You don't see that anymore.

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On the bottom, another interesting assortment of ports. We got a USB-C port, speaker, the other mic,

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and a headphone jack, 3.5mm. We got micro SD card slots, dual SIM cards, 3.5mm jack, like what?

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This is why it's so nice to cover hardware made by passionate people who are like creating a very

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intentional device instead of just like the big stuff from the big giant tech conglomerates.

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They don't care about you. They're trying to rot your brain. On the back, we have a plastic

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pretty fingerprint-magnity surface there, which is kind of too bad, but there's a camera there

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and flash. And also, you can't see it, but I happen to know there's wireless charging support

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in the back here as well. So that's nice to see. And one thing I totally forgot to mention while

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I was looking at the front here is that the selfie camera is way down in the corner here. So it's

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nice to see it has a selfie camera on a like a e-ink phone like this. You might even expect

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that they would just drop that. A strange placement for it. We'll find out if that feels weird.

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Okay, let's find out what it's like to use this thing. Let's get

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minimal and do a minimally intrusive segue to our sponsor. All right, let the minimalizing

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begin. Interacting with this is, you know, based on normal kind of swipe gestures like

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any other Android phone. I mean, the difference is that it's running a custom Android scan on

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top of Android 14. We have our home screen here with just words instead of icons, but all of those

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lead to the actual apps. I know that some of the other phones have like custom versions of all

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these apps. Like the light phone three has restrictions. They didn't have Google Maps.

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They had their own kind of map service, but this has Maps messages and notes, but notes is Google

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Keep. Maps is Google Maps. And what screen refresh rate am I in? This is, I can barely see anything.

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And right away, I feel like we are running into the issue here. You need maps. Quick settings,

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though, is something different. So this is, let's familiarize ourselves with these before we get

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too deep, because this is how you're going to customize your experience with this display.

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There's a brightness slider up top. LAMPS measured the max brightness on this top slider,

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which is like the blue backlight. That goes up to 124 nits. And then you can get with the

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orange backlight, it gets even brighter up to 351. That's important. You can customize the kind of

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color and brightness of the display. You can have a max blue backlight and then you can change how

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warm it is. Oh, and this slider down here is the keyboard backlight. And then on here, you got

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some presets. So if you want to quickly make it fire hot, hot, or cold, cold, or more of a

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nighttime sleepy mode, I made this custom mode. So you can select custom, move things around,

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and then hold. Actually, if I want to make that brighter, and then you hold the wrench,

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and that locks in that custom preset. So then you can switch to that again quickly.

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And then down at the bottom, we got refresh speed. So each of these sections has this handy little

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info thing you can bring up. You got slow, ultra. And in the middle, you got hybrid,

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which tries to adapt to the content you're looking at on screen. Because yes, it's Android.

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You can play videos. You can play games if you really want to. You shouldn't want to. But,

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you know, I'm not going to judge. I'm going to leave it on slow for now. We can get back to this

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screen by holding the refresh, the manual refresh button, that'll bring it back at any time. So

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that's handy. That's our home screen. Swiping up gets you your full list of apps, which again is

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just a regular list. It's not like a grid or anything. And, you know, you got all the apps

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that you could want on here. If you really, really, really, really need a fix for something

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that you can only get on a normal Android phone, you can get it through Google Play. And as you

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can see, you know, even in the slow mode, just scrolling through stuff isn't the worst. Like

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this is more than usable. If you scroll super fast, that might get a little bit confusing.

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But if you're reading or reading, it should be fine. Okay, so that's the basics of the display.

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Let's check out this keyboard. I'm going to write a little note here. So open Google Keep,

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which is called Notes. And wait, what is the part of the plus sign is missing? I wonder what

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that's about. While doing some research on this phone, I saw some people complaining about the

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pixel density of this display. It's only 800 by 600. And it's e-paper. It's not even like

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e-ink branded. Like his e-ink is like an entity. It's a third party thing. And they had some

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complaints about how, you know, really small stuff can be kind of hard to see on this display.

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But I'm confused about this. Like, why is it just taking out, as I clicked on it, it appeared.

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Can I, I can't zoom in on it. So I guess be aware that some UI elements might just not be there,

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I guess. That's kind of strange. But anyways, let's type something. Can I do a haiku? Makes

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me love phones. Typing is bliss. Typing is bliss. Yeah, I like that better.

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What? That wasn't fun. But that's because I think I just haven't had enough time like getting used

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to this. I will say that the keys are nice and clicky. I did, like if I, if I just like button

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mash for a second and pretend I know how to type. Yeah, that feels good. From what I can see,

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people who have been using this phone do like the keyboard. It just will, it'll take some getting

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used to if you haven't used a physical keyboard in a while. I can't stop focusing on this camera

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down there. I need to find out. I need to find out what that's about. Camera. Activate. Okay. Okay,

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interesting. We're in the slow refresh rate mode right now because it's like, oh no, we're in the

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fast mode. Oh, okay. What does it look like in slow mode? I hit the multitasking button. It's got

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the same old Android, it's got the same old Android multitasking interface, but you can see,

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in slow refresh rate mode, this is not, it doesn't want you to do this. It's stopping you.

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It's stopping you from, from wanting to use your phone. It's not stopping you from doing the

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things you need to do. It's just making you not want to do anything else. Oh, wow. Look at that.

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Okay, wait, I'll try to hold this as still as I can. Well, let's take a camera. Let's take a picture

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there. So this is a 16 megapixel camera. It does take in full color. It doesn't take full like

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monochrome pictures or anything. 16 megapixels. It's not going to be amazing. This front selfie

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camera is five megapixels. Does it have the camera shortcut? It does. Okay, double clicking power goes

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to the camera. So that's nice now. And we're back to doing this crazy thing. Sometimes slow mode can't

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handle, you know, high refresh rate in the camera app, but sometimes it can. Okay, in high, in high

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refresh rate mode, yes. It's, it's keeping up. You can, you can use the viewfinder well enough

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to figure out what you're looking at. Okay, let's do a selfie. See, like, I'm, it's funny. I'm

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expecting the camera to be up here, but the camera is down in the corner. Oh, that's a horrible photo.

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And I'm sure it'll look even worse in the full color version. But like, you see, like,

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that's kind of a fun, like, effect. Maybe I want to look at all my photos like this. Wow. It's a

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camera. If you really need to snap a photo of something, you know, they have a camera on there,

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but don't pretend like you're going to be posting those to Instagram. Taking a video. This is me

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taking a video. And I guess we can hear what the mic is like on this guy. What do you guys think? Does

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it sound good? And this is what video is like on the other side. Stop that. Wow. This is actually

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looking pretty nice on the actual camera display. I could vlog like this. Let's go to YouTube. I

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opened YouTube and it goes to the shorts right away. Oh, it's an ad for TikTok. What? How ironic.

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Hello. You can't hold it. You can't hold the button to go up. You have to manually click it all the

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way up. Also, when I hit the volume, the slider is in the middle of the screen. You can't see the

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UI properly. How do I? Okay. I can just guess where the playhead was.

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You don't need anything more than that. Invite some friends over. Gather around the minimal phone.

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But anyways, the speakers are bad. I don't know what you want me to say. They were going to be

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bad always. But again, same theme. You can do it. It's going to suck. You should only use it for a

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calculator, calendar, all of these things. You know, it is kind of weird. I didn't talk much at

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the beginning about like the kind of a wonky design of this thing, like in general, like it's got these

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thick bezels and these like really flat sides and it's pretty thick for like a smartphone. That's

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something to consider. It's probably not wider than most phones are these days, but it is kind of

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like a strange design. I think it still fits in your pocket pretty nice. Like it doesn't feel

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weird in your pocket. It feels like a normal phone. But there is a certain element of like when you

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buy a phone like this, you know, you kind of need to know what you're getting into. And what you're

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getting into in terms of performance is not a lot of it. It's got a MediaTek Helio G99. It's a

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six nanometer processor that, you know, no one's ever heard of probably, except for you, the person

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who recognized it, you got it. And the base model is 128 gigs of storage with six gigs of memory.

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You can upgrade that to eight gigs of memory with 256 gigs of storage. Or like I pointed out earlier,

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there's an micro SD card slot. You can just put in a giant micro SD card if you're ever worried

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about storage space on here. And because this does run normal Android and you can do the normal

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Android things on it, we had Labs do their normal testing with it. So unsurprisingly, Labs found

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that the minimal phone, you know, it's just the performance isn't that impressive on Geekbench

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6 multicore. We've got 2000 score compared to 10,000 with the Samsung S25 Ultra and 4500 with

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Pixel 9a. I'm not sure whether they put a weak processor in because they're like, ah, it's an

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ink display, you know, you don't need that many resources or whether that was part of their sort

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of like willful impedance of your ability to use the product. You know, it's a feature, not a bug.

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I don't know. Labs did our normal stress test with a gaming benchmark and they wrote no thermal

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throttling, but this device doesn't perform enough compute to generate enough heat to throttle. So

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gotcha, gotcha good. So we've got a bit of an interesting result here with the battery discharge

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test. Typical performance of modern phones in this test. According to Labs, they get usually

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around 16 to 24 hours. This phone, however, on their website, they say that it has a four day

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battery life. But with our battery discharge, which was playing 1080p video streaming from a

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Plex server, it lasted four hours and 22 minutes. The whole idea is that you're not going to be

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using this for video playback. From what I've seen, people are using this and it lasts, you know,

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like a day or more, which is like, you know, that's what you can expect from modern smartphones.

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Charging was also an interesting situation. With the 45 watt charger, it took 144 minutes

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to charge. With the 20 watt charger, it took 107 minutes to charge. You're not going to get like

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the most crazy super quick charging performance out of this thing. One more note from Labs that I

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want to make sure that I get to here. They signed in with their Google account and then when they

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were typing, the password for the Labs account showed up in the auto fill. That's something to maybe

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fix. Minimal phone. Oh, I didn't do the fingerprint reader real quick. What? It won't let me do a

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pattern. Oh, it'll let me start from the top. There's just little janky things like that. You

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know, it's not refreshing. So I can't tell whether I'm making progress or not. It's doing little

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vibrates, but normally with this graphic, like it's a fingerprint and it'll like fill out as you

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add more to it. Oh, it worked. Okay. Let's unlock it. Okay. I feel like that was a great little

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microcosm for this phone. You can do the things. Parts of it are going to suck and then other parts

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will be just fine. This situation is just so fascinating to me because here we have these

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like amazing devices in our pockets that can literally do everything. They're Swiss Army knives

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times a million. We have calculators, cameras, sensors, wallets like NFC. This thing has NFC

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is by the way, you can use it like that. We have so many different tools in our phones. What comes

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along with that is like being hooked into these apps that are literally melting our brain and

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especially melting kids brains. We have people kind of trying to address that on like the other side.

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They're trying to change social media platforms. They're trying to change regulations, trying to

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ban phones and schools. And then the other side, we have people trying to attack it from this

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dimension where they're like, okay, the portals that you use to get to that brain rot stuff.

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We have to take this pipe that you go through and shrink it so you can only get your ARM through a

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little bit and swipe tic-tac with one finger. It's an analogy. It works. So at the end of the day,

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I like that the minimal phone exists and it's actually not as expensive as like a more premium

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kind of device like the light phone 3. I think that goes for around like 600 bucks. This thing is

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starting at $400. I think that's like an early bird price. The upper tier is $500. At $500,

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you're kind of getting into like, okay, at what point do you decide you can just have some self

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control and turn on monochrome on your regular Android device and delete apps that you don't

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want, you don't think you should be using all that stuff. So overall, I'm happy that it exists.

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And I'm happy that you watched this whole video. I like the time that we spend together. How about

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we spend some more time? Go check out some of the e-paper, e-ing tablets I've done. I don't know

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which one I've done more recently, but they're all good.