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 non-smart phones,
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 counter-intuitive. We've covered a couple
of these on the channel. I think Linus 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, MP01, 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 itself. Let's see what's in the box. We've got a SIM card tool, a only 10 watt charger.
This thing is probably not going to suck up a lot of battery with an e-ink 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 lab's data says about that. Also a USB-C 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 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.
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-ink display, you're probably not going to have a great typing
experience. They're not known for their fast refresh rates and like responsive touch screens.
So having an 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-inch 4x3 aspect ratio e-paper display,
600x800 resolution. We've 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
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, it's going to be ghosting a little bit, e-ink, and that'll just do a manual refresh,
like 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 USB-C port, speaker, the other mic,
and a headphone jack, 3.5mm. We got micro SD card slots, dual SIM cards, 3.5mm 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-magnity 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-ink phone like this. You might even expect
that they would just drop that. A strange placement for it. We'll find out if that feels weird.
Okay, let's find out what it's like to use this thing. Let's get
minimal and do a minimally intrusive segue to our sponsor. 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 difference is that it's running a custom Android scan on
top of Android 14. We have our home screen here with just words 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 three 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 screen refresh rate am I in? This is, 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. LAMPS measured the max brightness on this top slider,
which is like the blue backlight. 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 keyboard backlight. And then on here, you got
some presets. So if you want to quickly make it fire hot, hot, or cold, cold, or more of a
nighttime sleepy mode, I made this 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 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 again is
just a regular list. It's not like a grid or anything. And, you know, you got all 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
this is more than usable. 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-ink branded. Like his e-ink is like 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 appeared.
Can I, I can't zoom in on it. So I guess be aware that some UI elements might just not be there,
I guess. 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 bliss. Yeah, I like that better.
What? That wasn't fun. 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, it's got the same old Android multitasking interface, but you can see,
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 this 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 pictures or anything. 16 megapixels. It's not going to be amazing. This front selfie
camera is five megapixels. Does it have the camera shortcut? It does. Okay, double clicking power goes
to the camera. So that's nice now. And we're back to doing this crazy thing. Sometimes slow mode can't
handle, you know, high refresh rate 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. What do you guys think? Does
it sound good? And this is what video is like on the other side. Stop that. Wow. This is actually
looking pretty nice on the actual camera display. I could vlog like this. Let's go to YouTube. I
opened YouTube and it goes to the shorts right away. Oh, it's an ad for TikTok. 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. You can't see the
UI properly. How do I? Okay. I can just guess where the playhead was.
You don't need anything more than that. Invite some friends over. Gather around the minimal phone.
But anyways, the speakers are bad. I don't know what you want me to say. They were going to be
bad always. 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 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 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. It's a
six nanometer 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 six gigs of memory.
You can upgrade that to eight gigs of memory with 256 gigs of storage. Or like I pointed out earlier,
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, you know, it's just the performance isn't that impressive on Geekbench
6 multicore. We've got 2000 score compared to 10,000 with the Samsung S25 Ultra and 4500 with
Pixel 9a. I'm not sure whether they put a weak processor in because they're like, ah, it's an
ink 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 the product. You know, it's a feature, not a bug.
I don't know. Labs did our normal stress test with a gaming benchmark and they wrote no thermal
throttling, but this device doesn't perform enough compute to generate enough heat to throttle. So
gotcha, gotcha good. So we've got a bit of an interesting result here with the battery discharge
test. Typical performance of modern phones in this test. According to Labs, they get usually
around 16 to 24 hours. This phone, however, on their website, they say that it has a four day
battery life. But with our battery discharge, which was playing 1080p video streaming from a
Plex server, it lasted four 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, 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 super quick charging performance out of this thing. One more note from Labs that I
want to make sure that I get to here. They signed in with their Google account and then when they
were typing, the password for the Labs account showed up in the auto fill. That's something to maybe
fix. Minimal phone. Oh, I didn't do the fingerprint reader real quick. What? 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 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. 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
is 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 stuff.
We have to take this pipe that you go through and shrink it so you can only get your ARM through a
little bit and swipe tic-tac with one finger. It's an analogy. It works. So at the end of the day,
I like that the minimal 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 $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 all that stuff. So overall, I'm happy that it exists.
And I'm happy that you watched this whole video. I like the time that we spend together. How about
we spend some more time? Go check out some of the e-paper, e-ing tablets I've done. I don't know
which one I've done more recently, but they're all good.