WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.320 Bad news gamers. Brain rot is real. Social media and their funky algorithms have screwed everything up, 00:00:06.320 --> 00:00:12.720 but thankfully some people are starting to realize this and that's why all of these non-smart phones, 00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:19.760 dumb phones if you will, minimalist phones have sprouted up with what they say might be a solution 00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:25.520 to that problem. A phone you don't like using. It's counter-intuitive. We've covered a couple 00:00:25.600 --> 00:00:30.880 of these on the channel. I think Linus did the light phone 3 which had a OLED display, 00:00:30.880 --> 00:00:36.560 but it made a mistake that a lot of these dumb phone makers are making, which is thinking that in 00:00:36.560 --> 00:00:42.880 order to get people to use their phones less, you need to take away functionality from the actual 00:00:42.880 --> 00:00:48.800 phone. The minimal phone, MP01, takes a different approach. You can do almost everything on this 00:00:48.800 --> 00:00:55.120 phone that you do on a regular smartphone. It just kind of sucks, which might be what you want 00:00:55.120 --> 00:00:59.440 if you're going for a product like this. So let's take a look at it before we take the look at the 00:00:59.440 --> 00:01:06.480 phone itself. Let's see what's in the box. We've got a SIM card tool, a only 10 watt charger. 00:01:06.480 --> 00:01:11.280 This thing is probably not going to suck up a lot of battery with an e-ink display. I think it's 00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:17.520 only got a 3000 mAh battery, which is pretty small, but also 10 watts is pretty slow these days. 00:01:17.520 --> 00:01:25.760 We'll see what the lab's data says about that. Also a USB-C cord about four feet as they tend to be. 00:01:25.760 --> 00:01:33.600 And is that it? This is what? There's a skin in the box. Dbrand. This is a Dbrand skin because 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:40.560 Minimal, they did a collaboration with Dbrand to offer Dbrand skins. Right now, these are only 00:01:40.560 --> 00:01:46.320 available on Minimal's website and not on Dbrand's website. And that is all that's in the box. 00:01:46.800 --> 00:01:52.800 Let's move to the device itself. Now you may have noticed this thing has a physical keyboard on the 00:01:52.800 --> 00:01:57.280 front. That's because with an e-ink display, you're probably not going to have a great typing 00:01:57.280 --> 00:02:01.440 experience. They're not known for their fast refresh rates and like responsive touch screens. 00:02:01.440 --> 00:02:08.160 So having an included hardware keyboard is pretty nice. But let's look at the actual 00:02:08.160 --> 00:02:16.720 rest of the device. So on the front here, we got a 4.3-inch 4x3 aspect ratio e-paper display, 00:02:16.720 --> 00:02:22.640 600x800 resolution. We've got a home button, back button, multitasking button. We'll get into that. 00:02:22.640 --> 00:02:27.440 On this side, we have the power button, which also doubles as a fingerprint reader. I haven't 00:02:28.080 --> 00:02:34.160 set that up yet, but we will. On the top, we have nothing else except for the mic. One of the mics, 00:02:34.160 --> 00:02:38.240 anyway. On the right side of the phone, we have kind of an interesting arrangement here. We have 00:02:38.240 --> 00:02:45.280 the volume up, volume down, and in the middle is a refresh button for the screen. So as we're using 00:02:45.280 --> 00:02:51.280 the screen, it's going to be ghosting a little bit, e-ink, and that'll just do a manual refresh, 00:02:51.280 --> 00:02:55.520 like shaking an etch-a-sketch to like clear it or whatever. And then up at the top here, 00:02:55.520 --> 00:03:02.320 we have a dual SIM card tray that doubles as a micro SD card slot. You don't see that anymore. 00:03:02.320 --> 00:03:08.640 On the bottom, another interesting assortment of ports. We got a USB-C port, speaker, the other mic, 00:03:08.640 --> 00:03:17.200 and a headphone jack, 3.5mm. We got micro SD card slots, dual SIM cards, 3.5mm jack, like what? 00:03:17.200 --> 00:03:22.240 This is why it's so nice to cover hardware made by passionate people who are like creating a very 00:03:22.240 --> 00:03:26.880 intentional device instead of just like the big stuff from the big giant tech conglomerates. 00:03:26.880 --> 00:03:32.160 They don't care about you. They're trying to rot your brain. On the back, we have a plastic 00:03:32.720 --> 00:03:38.880 pretty fingerprint-magnity surface there, which is kind of too bad, but there's a camera there 00:03:38.880 --> 00:03:44.160 and flash. And also, you can't see it, but I happen to know there's wireless charging support 00:03:44.160 --> 00:03:48.000 in the back here as well. So that's nice to see. And one thing I totally forgot to mention while 00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:53.120 I was looking at the front here is that the selfie camera is way down in the corner here. So it's 00:03:53.120 --> 00:03:57.360 nice to see it has a selfie camera on a like a e-ink phone like this. You might even expect 00:03:57.360 --> 00:04:02.960 that they would just drop that. A strange placement for it. We'll find out if that feels weird. 00:04:02.960 --> 00:04:06.080 Okay, let's find out what it's like to use this thing. Let's get 00:04:06.880 --> 00:04:13.760 minimal and do a minimally intrusive segue to our sponsor. All right, let the minimalizing 00:04:14.480 --> 00:04:20.480 begin. Interacting with this is, you know, based on normal kind of swipe gestures like 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:25.440 any other Android phone. I mean, the difference is that it's running a custom Android scan on 00:04:25.440 --> 00:04:33.040 top of Android 14. We have our home screen here with just words instead of icons, but all of those 00:04:33.040 --> 00:04:38.480 lead to the actual apps. I know that some of the other phones have like custom versions of all 00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:42.240 these apps. Like the light phone three has restrictions. They didn't have Google Maps. 00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:48.080 They had their own kind of map service, but this has Maps messages and notes, but notes is Google 00:04:48.080 --> 00:04:56.400 Keep. Maps is Google Maps. And what screen refresh rate am I in? This is, I can barely see anything. 00:04:57.520 --> 00:05:03.680 And right away, I feel like we are running into the issue here. You need maps. Quick settings, 00:05:03.680 --> 00:05:08.000 though, is something different. So this is, let's familiarize ourselves with these before we get 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:12.480 too deep, because this is how you're going to customize your experience with this display. 00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:17.280 There's a brightness slider up top. LAMPS measured the max brightness on this top slider, 00:05:17.280 --> 00:05:22.640 which is like the blue backlight. That goes up to 124 nits. And then you can get with the 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:29.840 orange backlight, it gets even brighter up to 351. That's important. You can customize the kind of 00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:35.520 color and brightness of the display. You can have a max blue backlight and then you can change how 00:05:35.520 --> 00:05:40.800 warm it is. Oh, and this slider down here is the keyboard backlight. And then on here, you got 00:05:40.800 --> 00:05:48.880 some presets. So if you want to quickly make it fire hot, hot, or cold, cold, or more of a 00:05:48.880 --> 00:05:55.280 nighttime sleepy mode, I made this custom mode. So you can select custom, move things around, 00:05:55.280 --> 00:05:59.200 and then hold. Actually, if I want to make that brighter, and then you hold the wrench, 00:05:59.200 --> 00:06:04.240 and that locks in that custom preset. So then you can switch to that again quickly. 00:06:04.240 --> 00:06:09.040 And then down at the bottom, we got refresh speed. So each of these sections has this handy little 00:06:09.040 --> 00:06:14.800 info thing you can bring up. You got slow, ultra. And in the middle, you got hybrid, 00:06:14.800 --> 00:06:20.720 which tries to adapt to the content you're looking at on screen. Because yes, it's Android. 00:06:20.720 --> 00:06:27.120 You can play videos. You can play games if you really want to. You shouldn't want to. But, 00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:31.680 you know, I'm not going to judge. I'm going to leave it on slow for now. We can get back to this 00:06:31.680 --> 00:06:38.000 screen by holding the refresh, the manual refresh button, that'll bring it back at any time. So 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.280 that's handy. That's our home screen. Swiping up gets you your full list of apps, which again is 00:06:43.280 --> 00:06:49.280 just a regular list. It's not like a grid or anything. And, you know, you got all the apps 00:06:49.280 --> 00:06:54.560 that you could want on here. If you really, really, really, really need a fix for something 00:06:54.560 --> 00:06:58.480 that you can only get on a normal Android phone, you can get it through Google Play. And as you 00:06:58.480 --> 00:07:04.080 can see, you know, even in the slow mode, just scrolling through stuff isn't the worst. Like 00:07:04.080 --> 00:07:08.800 this is more than usable. If you scroll super fast, that might get a little bit confusing. 00:07:08.800 --> 00:07:15.760 But if you're reading or reading, it should be fine. Okay, so that's the basics of the display. 00:07:15.760 --> 00:07:20.640 Let's check out this keyboard. I'm going to write a little note here. So open Google Keep, 00:07:20.640 --> 00:07:27.360 which is called Notes. And wait, what is the part of the plus sign is missing? I wonder what 00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:32.720 that's about. While doing some research on this phone, I saw some people complaining about the 00:07:32.720 --> 00:07:38.800 pixel density of this display. It's only 800 by 600. And it's e-paper. It's not even like 00:07:38.800 --> 00:07:44.880 e-ink branded. Like his e-ink is like an entity. It's a third party thing. And they had some 00:07:44.880 --> 00:07:52.080 complaints about how, you know, really small stuff can be kind of hard to see on this display. 00:07:52.080 --> 00:07:57.280 But I'm confused about this. Like, why is it just taking out, as I clicked on it, it appeared. 00:07:57.280 --> 00:08:04.320 Can I, I can't zoom in on it. So I guess be aware that some UI elements might just not be there, 00:08:04.320 --> 00:08:09.760 I guess. That's kind of strange. But anyways, let's type something. Can I do a haiku? Makes 00:08:11.360 --> 00:08:20.240 me love phones. Typing is bliss. Typing is bliss. Yeah, I like that better. 00:08:21.200 --> 00:08:28.080 What? That wasn't fun. But that's because I think I just haven't had enough time like getting used 00:08:28.080 --> 00:08:33.520 to this. I will say that the keys are nice and clicky. I did, like if I, if I just like button 00:08:33.520 --> 00:08:40.480 mash for a second and pretend I know how to type. Yeah, that feels good. From what I can see, 00:08:40.480 --> 00:08:44.800 people who have been using this phone do like the keyboard. It just will, it'll take some getting 00:08:44.800 --> 00:08:49.760 used to if you haven't used a physical keyboard in a while. I can't stop focusing on this camera 00:08:49.760 --> 00:08:55.680 down there. I need to find out. I need to find out what that's about. Camera. Activate. Okay. Okay, 00:08:55.680 --> 00:09:00.000 interesting. We're in the slow refresh rate mode right now because it's like, oh no, we're in the 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:06.560 fast mode. Oh, okay. What does it look like in slow mode? I hit the multitasking button. It's got 00:09:06.560 --> 00:09:12.560 the same old Android, it's got the same old Android multitasking interface, but you can see, 00:09:13.760 --> 00:09:19.280 in slow refresh rate mode, this is not, it doesn't want you to do this. It's stopping you. 00:09:19.280 --> 00:09:23.600 It's stopping you from, from wanting to use your phone. It's not stopping you from doing the 00:09:23.600 --> 00:09:29.760 things you need to do. It's just making you not want to do anything else. Oh, wow. Look at that. 00:09:29.760 --> 00:09:34.080 Okay, wait, I'll try to hold this as still as I can. Well, let's take a camera. Let's take a picture 00:09:34.080 --> 00:09:39.120 there. So this is a 16 megapixel camera. It does take in full color. It doesn't take full like 00:09:39.120 --> 00:09:45.840 monochrome pictures or anything. 16 megapixels. It's not going to be amazing. This front selfie 00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:51.360 camera is five megapixels. Does it have the camera shortcut? It does. Okay, double clicking power goes 00:09:51.360 --> 00:09:57.280 to the camera. So that's nice now. And we're back to doing this crazy thing. Sometimes slow mode can't 00:09:57.280 --> 00:10:03.520 handle, you know, high refresh rate in the camera app, but sometimes it can. Okay, in high, in high 00:10:03.520 --> 00:10:09.840 refresh rate mode, yes. It's, it's keeping up. You can, you can use the viewfinder well enough 00:10:09.840 --> 00:10:14.560 to figure out what you're looking at. Okay, let's do a selfie. See, like, I'm, it's funny. I'm 00:10:14.560 --> 00:10:22.400 expecting the camera to be up here, but the camera is down in the corner. Oh, that's a horrible photo. 00:10:22.400 --> 00:10:26.400 And I'm sure it'll look even worse in the full color version. But like, you see, like, 00:10:26.400 --> 00:10:31.680 that's kind of a fun, like, effect. Maybe I want to look at all my photos like this. Wow. It's a 00:10:31.680 --> 00:10:36.000 camera. If you really need to snap a photo of something, you know, they have a camera on there, 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:40.400 but don't pretend like you're going to be posting those to Instagram. Taking a video. This is me 00:10:40.400 --> 00:10:48.240 taking a video. And I guess we can hear what the mic is like on this guy. What do you guys think? Does 00:10:48.240 --> 00:10:58.240 it sound good? And this is what video is like on the other side. Stop that. Wow. This is actually 00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:04.800 looking pretty nice on the actual camera display. I could vlog like this. Let's go to YouTube. I 00:11:04.800 --> 00:11:11.200 opened YouTube and it goes to the shorts right away. Oh, it's an ad for TikTok. What? How ironic. 00:11:11.200 --> 00:11:16.560 Hello. You can't hold it. You can't hold the button to go up. You have to manually click it all the 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:22.560 way up. Also, when I hit the volume, the slider is in the middle of the screen. You can't see the 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:28.160 UI properly. How do I? Okay. I can just guess where the playhead was. 00:11:35.040 --> 00:11:39.360 You don't need anything more than that. Invite some friends over. Gather around the minimal phone. 00:11:40.080 --> 00:11:44.000 But anyways, the speakers are bad. I don't know what you want me to say. They were going to be 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:51.520 bad always. But again, same theme. You can do it. It's going to suck. You should only use it for a 00:11:51.520 --> 00:11:56.000 calculator, calendar, all of these things. You know, it is kind of weird. I didn't talk much at 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:01.200 the beginning about like the kind of a wonky design of this thing, like in general, like it's got these 00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:06.160 thick bezels and these like really flat sides and it's pretty thick for like a smartphone. That's 00:12:06.160 --> 00:12:12.560 something to consider. It's probably not wider than most phones are these days, but it is kind of 00:12:12.560 --> 00:12:19.520 like a strange design. I think it still fits in your pocket pretty nice. Like it doesn't feel 00:12:19.520 --> 00:12:23.280 weird in your pocket. It feels like a normal phone. But there is a certain element of like when you 00:12:23.280 --> 00:12:28.080 buy a phone like this, you know, you kind of need to know what you're getting into. And what you're 00:12:28.080 --> 00:12:37.200 getting into in terms of performance is not a lot of it. It's got a MediaTek Helio G99. It's a 00:12:37.200 --> 00:12:42.400 six nanometer processor that, you know, no one's ever heard of probably, except for you, the person 00:12:42.400 --> 00:12:48.640 who recognized it, you got it. And the base model is 128 gigs of storage with six gigs of memory. 00:12:48.640 --> 00:12:55.440 You can upgrade that to eight gigs of memory with 256 gigs of storage. Or like I pointed out earlier, 00:12:55.440 --> 00:12:59.840 there's an micro SD card slot. You can just put in a giant micro SD card if you're ever worried 00:12:59.840 --> 00:13:06.640 about storage space on here. And because this does run normal Android and you can do the normal 00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:11.520 Android things on it, we had Labs do their normal testing with it. So unsurprisingly, Labs found 00:13:11.520 --> 00:13:17.520 that the minimal phone, you know, it's just the performance isn't that impressive on Geekbench 00:13:17.520 --> 00:13:25.520 6 multicore. We've got 2000 score compared to 10,000 with the Samsung S25 Ultra and 4500 with 00:13:25.520 --> 00:13:30.720 Pixel 9a. I'm not sure whether they put a weak processor in because they're like, ah, it's an 00:13:30.720 --> 00:13:34.400 ink display, you know, you don't need that many resources or whether that was part of their sort 00:13:34.400 --> 00:13:40.800 of like willful impedance of your ability to use the product. You know, it's a feature, not a bug. 00:13:40.800 --> 00:13:46.480 I don't know. Labs did our normal stress test with a gaming benchmark and they wrote no thermal 00:13:46.480 --> 00:13:51.920 throttling, but this device doesn't perform enough compute to generate enough heat to throttle. So 00:13:51.920 --> 00:13:56.720 gotcha, gotcha good. So we've got a bit of an interesting result here with the battery discharge 00:13:56.720 --> 00:14:02.160 test. Typical performance of modern phones in this test. According to Labs, they get usually 00:14:02.160 --> 00:14:08.480 around 16 to 24 hours. This phone, however, on their website, they say that it has a four day 00:14:08.480 --> 00:14:14.480 battery life. But with our battery discharge, which was playing 1080p video streaming from a 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:20.640 Plex server, it lasted four hours and 22 minutes. The whole idea is that you're not going to be 00:14:20.640 --> 00:14:25.920 using this for video playback. From what I've seen, people are using this and it lasts, you know, 00:14:25.920 --> 00:14:31.280 like a day or more, which is like, you know, that's what you can expect from modern smartphones. 00:14:31.280 --> 00:14:35.520 Charging was also an interesting situation. With the 45 watt charger, it took 144 minutes 00:14:35.520 --> 00:14:40.240 to charge. With the 20 watt charger, it took 107 minutes to charge. You're not going to get like 00:14:40.240 --> 00:14:45.200 the most crazy super quick charging performance out of this thing. One more note from Labs that I 00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:49.680 want to make sure that I get to here. They signed in with their Google account and then when they 00:14:49.680 --> 00:14:55.360 were typing, the password for the Labs account showed up in the auto fill. That's something to maybe 00:14:55.360 --> 00:15:02.000 fix. Minimal phone. Oh, I didn't do the fingerprint reader real quick. What? It won't let me do a 00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:06.640 pattern. Oh, it'll let me start from the top. There's just little janky things like that. You 00:15:06.640 --> 00:15:11.840 know, it's not refreshing. So I can't tell whether I'm making progress or not. It's doing little 00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:16.880 vibrates, but normally with this graphic, like it's a fingerprint and it'll like fill out as you 00:15:16.880 --> 00:15:23.680 add more to it. Oh, it worked. Okay. Let's unlock it. Okay. I feel like that was a great little 00:15:23.680 --> 00:15:31.200 microcosm for this phone. You can do the things. Parts of it are going to suck and then other parts 00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:35.120 will be just fine. This situation is just so fascinating to me because here we have these 00:15:35.120 --> 00:15:40.080 like amazing devices in our pockets that can literally do everything. They're Swiss Army knives 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:47.280 times a million. We have calculators, cameras, sensors, wallets like NFC. This thing has NFC 00:15:47.280 --> 00:15:52.320 is by the way, you can use it like that. We have so many different tools in our phones. What comes 00:15:52.320 --> 00:15:58.080 along with that is like being hooked into these apps that are literally melting our brain and 00:15:58.160 --> 00:16:03.920 especially melting kids brains. We have people kind of trying to address that on like the other side. 00:16:03.920 --> 00:16:07.760 They're trying to change social media platforms. They're trying to change regulations, trying to 00:16:07.760 --> 00:16:12.800 ban phones and schools. And then the other side, we have people trying to attack it from this 00:16:12.800 --> 00:16:18.640 dimension where they're like, okay, the portals that you use to get to that brain rot stuff. 00:16:18.640 --> 00:16:23.600 We have to take this pipe that you go through and shrink it so you can only get your ARM through a 00:16:23.600 --> 00:16:28.480 little bit and swipe tic-tac with one finger. It's an analogy. It works. So at the end of the day, 00:16:28.480 --> 00:16:33.680 I like that the minimal phone exists and it's actually not as expensive as like a more premium 00:16:33.680 --> 00:16:38.400 kind of device like the light phone 3. I think that goes for around like 600 bucks. This thing is 00:16:38.400 --> 00:16:46.320 starting at $400. I think that's like an early bird price. The upper tier is $500. At $500, 00:16:46.320 --> 00:16:50.960 you're kind of getting into like, okay, at what point do you decide you can just have some self 00:16:50.960 --> 00:16:55.200 control and turn on monochrome on your regular Android device and delete apps that you don't 00:16:55.200 --> 00:16:59.520 want, you don't think you should be using all that stuff. So overall, I'm happy that it exists. 00:17:00.400 --> 00:17:05.360 And I'm happy that you watched this whole video. I like the time that we spend together. How about 00:17:05.360 --> 00:17:10.160 we spend some more time? Go check out some of the e-paper, e-ing tablets I've done. I don't know 00:17:10.160 --> 00:17:12.880 which one I've done more recently, but they're all good.