Waited weeks for this and was so excited it finally arrived today. Unboxed it, put it on charge, and…nothing. Won’t boot up, no signs of life. He’s dead, Jim.
Now I have to send it back and wait who knows how long if I want a replacement. Probably just going to ask for a refund; I can’t wait another 4-6 weeks or wait for one to ship from the September batch. Ugh!
Mildly infuriating, highly disappointing.
Mostly the e-ink display and the QWERTY keyboard.
By its nature, it’s not great for doom scrolling, TikTok, or videos (the major time sinks with most phones). Those aren’t my use-cases anyway; I’m more of a reader than a watcher so I figured this would be like a supercharged version of my Kobo (which I love) that has a physical keyboard (which I have missed terribly in smartphones).
Edit: Plus, its 4:3 e-ink display and keyboard just scream “install Termux on me!” Also planned to use it as a nice portable SSH terminal like I used to have back when smartphones had slide-out keyboards.
I’m rocking an aging Cat S22 Flip right now and have been trying to figure out what to replace it with. The Minimal Phone seemed like exactly what I wanted. Sad that it arrived DOA and am probably not going to bother replacing it; waiting weeks for something that arrives DOA is a hard thing to recover from.
Oh your use case is awesome, actually. I bet there are good epub readers on Android, which would make this phone perfect for that use case. It is super sad it was doa. Hopefully they’ll honor a replacement (faster than your original order), and you can start truly enjoying it.
I have a Hisense A5 that’s a crap phone, but Cantook side loaded and it’s the best e-reader I’ve ever owned, bar none. I can use it for podcasts too, although I usually just use my regular phone for that these days.
Cantook has 2/5 stars, but it actually looks really great
Cantook used to be called Aldiko, and it was literally the first ebook Reader I ever got for Android. I don’t know if it’s the best, but it opens epubs and lets me set dark mode and use the volume buttons as page turn, and doesn’t gum up e-ink with animations, so it’s ideal for the Hisense. I don’t know why it only has 2/5.
I don’t either. From what you say, it sound great to me.
Yeah, I have a ticket in with support but haven’t heard back yet. I did ask specifically about the turnaround time for a replacement. Hopefully that’s a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don’t want $400+ tied up until the next batch ships in September.
Oof. September? I really hope you get it before then! I wonder how many people had this doa issue with this batch. Maybe there’s an issue with that manufacturer. Not really something you can control or probably find out, but it would be interesting to know.
I honestly don’t think they’d tell me, but I’d also be interested to know. Fingers crossed they have some stock on hand for the occasional replacement.