My phone is an ereader now
I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick it up again without arousing suspicion after the light had been turned out. I think I slowed my reading for fun as the work load of school increased, and stopped when moving every four months for internships in university. Having something small and portable that I could load books onto changed that and got my momentum going again. I now loosely grade how much I'm thriving by how much I'm reading, as an indirect indicator of how not burnt out I am.
It fared me quite well, but I had a few issues with it. Library books would randomly not work on it, even if they would show up on, for example, the Libby app on my phone. It also came with a way to sync articles to it via Pocket, but it always required a little too much forethought for me: I had to remember to find and save articles beforehand in order to then read them later. There were some services to do this automatically via RSS but the syncing process itself was just slow enough that I found myself rarely doing it. Also, Mozilla has now killed Pocket as a service. In the middle of writing this, they announced support for Instapaper instead, but it has the same workflow issues for me. My partner reads on her phone, but something about reading on a screen grates on me after a while, and makes it too easy to jump to something else.
So I was intrigued when I heard about the Minimal Phone, an Android phone with an epaper display. It wasn't the first epaper Android device I'd seen—I've seen reviews saying the Boox Palma is actually pretty great—but it was the idea of this being an actual phone that can take a sim card that really get me interested. What if I could read the news and blogs on what looks like paper while commuting, without having the forethought of downloading or syncing something? I might otherwise spend that time staring into space or looking at nothing on Bluesky. I'd probably rather be reading a bit of a book, or other longer-form writing. So I ordered one as a gift to myself.
I figured I might be a good fit for this device. I don't really watch videos on my phone. I send messages a bit, but not urgently. Most of the time I'm at or near a full keyboard anyway. I take some photos, but not that many any more. I feel like the photo winds changed for me sometime in university and I now feel weird posting Nice Photos to social media. Who are those for, really? I now send quick photos directly to friends mostly, and they don't have to be print quality or anything. They just have to be visible.
With that in mind, I went in treating it like an experiment. I still have my Kobo that has its annoyances but works. I still have a fully functional Pixel 8 phone. I don't need this to work. At worst, this could just be an alternate ereader for me. So when it arrived mid-July, I started testing it full-time to see how it'd go, with my normal phone in my bag just in case.
Overall, I actually really like it! I absolutely would not recommend this device to everyone—I'll get into why later—but it's been working pretty well for me.
How the Minimal Phone works
This phone is around the same size of my Pixel 8. It's just a tad shorter and just a tad wider. I don't really feel the shortness, but I do feel the wideness a bit, which makes it more comfortable to read on. The bottom third of the height is taken up by a physical keyboard, and the top two thirds are an epaper display.
It's just Android under there, with a black-and-white epaper display. It comes with a few launchers, and I use one that works like a pretty traditional launcher, but comes with some built in icon choices that look sharp on the display.
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