Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
As someone who is chronically online because of my work and interests, digital minimalism is something that interests me deeply and is something that I’ve tried to inculcate in my off-work hours. But if you spend any amount of time around people who talk about digital minimalism, you start hearing the same familiar pitches. Switch to a dumb phone. Delete your apps. Turn everything grayscale. If you want to go a step further, lock your phone away. The advice always sounds great until you actually try living with it. For one, my job relies on technology and communication, and I can’t exactly turn off the dial on that.
Moreover, most of us cannot simply retreat from the world. We need maps, banking, authentication, messaging, and the small conveniences that make everyday life function smoothly. That tension between wanting less and needing enough is where most of these experiments fall apart. At least they do for me. You either give up too much or you fall right back into the same cycle of tapping and scrolling without even knowing it.
On the flip side, I’ve had a decade-long fascination with E-Ink. From owning and enjoying practically every generation of the Kindle to multiple attempts at building out E-Ink dashboards, I love how calm they feel and that they help me slow down without feeling hostile towards the reality of my daily requirements.
For the longest time, I’ve treated E-Ink gadgets as simple reading tools, something to pick up to catch up on my reading habit and put away before getting back to work, but it is abundantly clear that I’m not the only one who thinks that E-Ink could be more than that. What if it could be the bridge between modern connectivity and a simpler way to co-exist with technology? And what if the limitations that made E-Ink impractical for entertainment were the same limitations that could make it the perfect antidote to smartphone overload? Now that color E-Ink is finally making its way to handheld devices, it’s opened up a perfect middle ground. You get the splash of color needed to make sense of everything from traffic data in maps to gradients in apps, while avoiding the overstimulation of a regular phone.
That line of thinking led me to the Boox Palma 2 Pro ().
Would you consider an e-ink phone as a minimalist alternative? 1 votes Yes, it's the perfect middle-ground for me. 0 % Maybe. I'm not sure if I could manage the limitations. 100 % No, I need a full-featured high-performance smartphone. 0 % No, I want to go all-in with a feature phone. 0 %
The case for an E-Ink reader as a minimalist smartphone
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
My first reaction when I saw the Palma 2 Pro’s details was a bit of confusion. The Palma 2 was a popular device for its portable form-factor and Android support. It could be a smartphone-lite if you had round-the-clock Wi-Fi connectivity. But it was no smartphone replacement.
... continue reading