Minimal Phone Review
I so wanted this to work!
The minimalist lifestyle is not a new trend. For years now, some phone makers have dedicated their resources in reducing the reliance of smartphone usage in a digital age full of technological influence. A company called Minimal is the latest to take a crack at the task with the release of their first phone, the Minimal Phone.
With an E-ink display, a physical keyboard, and full access to the Google Play Store, Minimal isn’t stripping users of their smartphone capabilities. Their approach is to make the smartphone experience so unenjoyable that users won’t want to endlessly doom scroll or binge watch like they would on any other smartphone. After a couple of weeks using the Minimal Phone as my daily driver, I’d say their way is the most successful and logical out of all the minimalist phones out there. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot the company will have to address before they can even be relied upon as a phone company.
Purchase Price: $399
The Minimal Look
Let’s start off with the basics, the Minimal Phone is a slab phone. However, unlike modern slabs, this phone is a bit wider as you’ll be likely holding it with two hands at all times. The reason for this is thanks to the physical keyboard that is built into the body of the phone. The QWERTY keyboard layout stretches from end to end with a lengthy space bar splitting the symbol and emoji buttons totaling for 35 keys. I found the keyboard to perform rather well. There’s enough of a tactile input to feel satisfying to click into. The symbology is easy to read and I do prefer the square buttons to press into than round ones.
The E-ink display and physical keyboard combination
Minimal has some software controls that can be customized under the Minimal Keyboard app. This allows users to change the flow of commands like auto-capitalization, spacing, and some other basic keyboard functions. It isn’t a significant influence on the typing experience and I would have liked to see more useful shortcut mechanics that later Blackberry phones perfected like the touchpad keyboard for navigation. It’s a little less of a missed opportunity than say on the Clicks keyboard as the Minimal Phone doesn’t really utilize its keyboard for anything other than texting and emails.
This is due to the fact that it’s intended to be a minimally used phone that requires constant manual refreshing of its E-paper touch screen. Located directly above the keyboard is a 4.3”, 600 x 800 p black and white E-ink panel. It’s surprisingly competent with a density of 230 ppi. If you have a document or digital book open to read, the text is extremely sharp and easily viewable from all directions. It’s also glare-free which is important for an E-paper panel like this. It might be odd to claim that a phone with less than 1080p resolution has a good viewing experience, but that’s how it works with a more compact screen size and an E-ink format.
Owners of this phone won’t be playing much of any games or videos on the Minimal Phone for two main reasons. The first being that the nature of E-ink panels is not optimal for quickly changing images. While the Minimal software does give users the ability to change between three refresh modes, with one of them catering towards gaming and video playback, it is still far from an enjoyable viewing experience. You’ll catch blotches of black and white ink spots as the screen struggles to keep up with modern video formats and FPS counts.
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4.3 inch 600 × 800p
E-ink display
230 ppi
Android 14
MediaTek Helio G99 CPU
6 GB ram
128 GB of storage
3,00 mAh battery
Power button fingerprint sensor
Physical keyboard
Living With Issues
The other reason for the lack of media usage is due to the screen input lag. While the MediaTek Helio G99 chipset powering the Minimal Phone may be powerful enough to handle most apps and games with considerably decent speed on other devices, the E-ink display here holds back a lot of the performance even though it's backed by 6 GB of ram and 128 GB of storage. Swiping through on-screen command prompts or scrolling through an article will always feel delayed. It’s roughly a one second delay between when your finger prompts a command and visibly seeing that action play through.
This is further exacerbated due to the residue images from the previous screen that is left over in the background. Because of how E-ink displays operate, they really aren’t meant to be used for anything other than for viewing static text. Minimal tries to assist users to enhance this viewing experience by including a small E-ink Refresh button squished between the Volume Up and Volume Down buttons on the left side of the frame. Clicking into the button will prompt the display to immediately refresh the panel and remove any residually engraved images from the previous screen. It’s a bit like those children’s doodle boards where pressing a button will wipe the screen clean for the next set of work to be drawn.
While this is on par with what a buyer should anticipate from any E-ink device, it still is rather frustrating to use as your daily driver when you’re scanning through work emails or pulling up an article for reference reading. Still, that’s exactly why the Minimal Phone works as a minimalistic solution. Because it does have full access to your Android apps, you’re not sacrificing your modern amenities to detach yourself from doom scrolling. It’s the 21st century and our modern lives revolve around technology whether we like it or not.
The Right Minimalist Way
No Sacrifices
Owners of the Minimal Phone have access to the entire Google Play Store
In my situation, I don’t carry any physical keys with me anymore. I enter my house through keypads from Yale Lock. I lock and unlock my cars, as well as turn them on and off with my phone as the key. Other minimalist phones deprive users of these applications, thus forcing them to revert back into a more archaic lifestyle. Minimal gives me that access and I appreciate it. The Tesla and Kia app are not things I spend a lot of my time looking at. They work for me without me needing to give them my attention.
The Minimal Company understands this well and instead creates a platform to alter the applications that are addicting in nature like Reddit or YouTube to be essentially unenjoyable to use on this phone. It doesn’t treat buyers like addicts who need things taken away from them. It weans them off of addictions. My Mother always recalls a story of how she got me to stop relying on a pacifier when I was a baby. Instead of physically removing it from my possession and making me long for it while resenting her for removing a soothing tool, she instead sprayed a scent that I disliked onto it and I quickly disassociated interest in the tool because it wasn’t enjoyable to use anymore. This is very much the same practice and it fundamentally works.
Through my time using the Minimal Phone, I’ve dropped two mobile games that I was religiously farming on. I didn’t quit the two games because the Minimal Phone couldn’t run them. I quit them because it was so unenjoyable to play them that it wasn’t worth the trouble to keep my routines running. It’s quite effective as I no longer had the itch to load the games up after a while.
Not A Good Phone
So while this was an effective way of minimizing my smartphone usage, other aspects of being a phone were ineffective due to the product not being mature enough for consumer use. The main issue I had with the Minimal Phone was the ridiculously fast drain on the battery life. On paper, the 3,000 mAh battery in partnership with the E-ink display should give me multiple days off a plug like the company advertised. Instead what I found was that the phone would drain 1% per every minute I was actively using it. Something wasn’t right. The Minimal Phone runs on Android 14 skinned with what the company calls the Minimal Launcher.
The Minimal Launcher strips the Android experience down to a barebones navigation frontend. The home screen consists of a list of apps that are likely the most commonly used for a phone like this. That includes email, the phone app, and text messaging. In its core identity, the Minimal Launcher really only wants for owners to operate out of this screen. Swiping down will pull up another, longer list with the rest of the app suites that are downloaded onto the phone. That’s really all there is to operating the Minimal Phone. Outside of those changes, the notifications and settings menus are pretty much stock Android. There's a capacitive Android navigation bar on the bezel of the display sandwiched between the E-ink panel and the keyboard. The Navigation bar houses a Back Button, Home Button, and a Recent Apps button.
So where is this battery drain coming from? As a minimalist phone, there surprisingly aren’t a lot of premium antennas and connectivity options that the phone is missing. It has NFC that can be used for mobile payments. That’s another huge function that I’m glad the company kept and understood is important to modern society. There’s Bluetooth 5.2 as well as Wi-Fi 5. GPS also retains a spot inside the phone. The only thing it’s missing is 5G capabilities as 4G LTE are the highest supported bands that this unlocked phone utilizes.
There are an abundance of software related bugs that hamper the actual phone usage of this minimalist phone. It’s ironic that a minimalist device intending to deviate away from the smart aspects, all the while retaining essential functions like text and call, can’t even do the basics right. The Minimal Phone is terrible at this.
A permanent line stuck on the display
During my time with the phone, I consistently had issues making basic phone calls out. I would receive error messages saying that this phone could not make phone calls. It’s not the location as I use other phones to call from the exact same spots daily. It’s also not the service provider as, once again, I make calls frequently in those locations. A hard reset of the Minimal Phone usually resolves the call prevention problem. It’s occurred frequently enough for me to say that this is a deal breaking bug. If a phone that isn’t serviceable as a media device can’t function as a basic phone, it’s essentially worthless.
Then I also ran into constant automatic restarts and shutdowns. This would happen roughly once a day where the phone would freeze and restart after a period of time. It’s quite unacceptable for these combinations of issues to happen for a phone that needs to operate perfectly as a phone calling device. I’ve run into situations where I literally needed to make a call, but had to wait for the phone to sort itself out and reboot before I’m even able to push a call out. Time is money and if I can’t rely on the Minimal Phone to receive and make calls, I can’t use it for my business.
The third major deal breaker I encountered was a dreaded burn-in vertical line. Now to be fair, this is apparently not a real panel burn-in as the company has acknowledged that this is an issue they are aware of on their website and said a software patch should remove the permanent line from the display. It’s been weeks as of writing of this review and none have yet to be pushed to my phone. That’s a serious failure from Minimal as the E-ink display is one of the distinguishing features of the device. It's not a good look to have a non-refreshable line permanently stuck on a brand new phone.
Touch and Feel
I’ve gone quite negative in these last couple of sections so I’ll throw in a few things more that I did like about the phone before we wrap up this review. There’s a 3.5 mm headphone jack as well as a dual sim/expandable storage slot on the frame. You could throw some E-books onto a card and use this as an E-reader. That’s nice to have if it’s also your daily driving phone. I also found the fingerprint scanner embedded onto the Power Button on the right side of the frame to work pretty well. It’s not the fastest sensor, but it does the job for a phone like this. What really blew me away was when I found out this $400 phone had 15W Qi charging. I’ve reviewed more expensive phones that didn’t have wireless charging, so that was a pleasant surprise.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the build quality and physical design of the Minimal Phone. I find this design to be exceedingly handsome and amazing to hold. I just don’t find many devices to feel favorable to hold anymore and the Minimal Phone does it so well that it was a noticeable change of pace. The sharp edges of the frame just makes the phone feel so nice to grip. The shape of the phone is also quite attractive to me. The Onyx colorway with the white Minimal logo on the rear panel of the phone just looks so cleanly mixed together. I really dig the look of the phone and I can’t state that enough.
Just Don’t Use The Cameras
The front facing 5MP camera is also cleverly hidden on the bottom left of the keyboard layout. It isn’t positioned well for performance, but I surmise that neither that camera nor the 16 MP rear sensor will get much use from users. The slow refresh as well as the traits of an E-ink panel make framing photos essentially impossible.
With phones where I know the camera will be a weakness, I normally use a metric of whether it can at least take pictures of a car’s license plate and legibly recite the digits upon inspection in the event of an accident as a baseline. Emergency uses are the bare minimum I would require for a weaker camera set up. I don’t even know if I could take a reliable photo with this phone as it’s blobs of ink on the viewfinder. You can’t frame a picture if you can’t see what you’re pointing at. Then when you do actually hit the shutter button to take a snap, you don’t know if it actually snapped the picture due to the input delay. True E-ink panels just aren’t meant to be used with things like photo taking.
Final Thoughts
So while I fully embrace the Minimal way of detaching from the smartphone lifestyle, I can’t in good conscience recommend the phone to anyone. The Minimal Phone has been the most unreliable phone I’ve reviewed in years. When a phone can’t reliably make phone calls or even stay on without randomly resetting, it’s not viable for consumer usage.
There are way too many options on the market that have reached a viable threshold that makes a marginal niche phone like this one irrelevant when it isn’t perfect. That’s a pity because I wanted to love the Minimal Phone. For a couple of days I did find myself buying into what Minimal was selling. It was doing minimalism the right way in my opinion. Unfortunately, the company still has a long way to go and hopefully we do see a second and even a third iteration of this form factor.
I originally was going to end this review by suggesting that the company pivot to an OLED display over an E-ink panel for its next generation offering. I would greatly enjoy this form factor with a smooth operating modern smartphone display, but then I thought about it and it would only encourage me to look at the panel frequently which defeats the purpose of the Minimal lifestyle.
There’s no perfect way to address the issues of the Minimal Phone. While the E-ink implementation contributes to the removal of wanting to use the phone, I do think it’s also the cause of a lot of the Minimal Phone’s overarching issues. Regardless, whatever the future upgrades are, I do hope Minimal gets a shot at offering it as I’ll be watching in anticipation even though I will be returning this buggy first iteration back to the company for a refund.
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