The Minimal Phone is now shipping (E Ink phone with a QWERTY keyboard) - Liliputing
The Minimal Phone is now shipping (E Ink phone with a QWERTY keyboard) - Liliputing
But it has a slow screen refresh rate, which makes it less than ideal for watching videos, playing games, or other actions.
I love how this is one of the first criticisms, as if that wasn't the entire point of this device.
MediaTek
Ah yes, I forgot THAT'S why I didn't go for this thing.
I just watched the video in the article, and the slow refresh rate also makes the touch controls frustratingly unresponsive. I love the concept, and might be interested in the next generation of this device, but the poor responsiveness is a deal breaker.
And you have to hold down the shift or Fn while hitting the desired key. Like a freaking desktop keyboard. No sticky. Wtf is up with that?
Yep, for numbers, too. Like, I need two thumbs and bifocals to dial a phone number.
Yup. Definitely an awful design choice.
Pretty sure you can enable sticky keys on any keyboard in the settings. It's Android 14 and sticky keys is in the settings.
Yeah but it's a hardware keyboard, not a screen-keyboard. I am not saying that means it won't work - I definitely don't know - but it's conspicuous they focused on it briefly. SHRUG lol I'm sure there will be a hack for it if it doesn't already behave how people want.
The setting works on Bluetooth or plug in keyboards where you use a dongle.
Edit yeah I think the dude that made the video doesn't know that setting exists
Ah. Makes sense.
Is that just the best an e-ink device can do? I didn't even know you could get e-ink touchscreens at all!
Pretty much all kindles have touch screens these days.
And the current generation of Supernote, Remarkable, etc e-ink tablets have reasonable response times.
That's cool, are any of them full Android devices that you can tinker with?
The Supernote is running a version of Android that let's you sideload stuff, but I haven't messed with it too much. There are also boox devices that are Android based and the inkpalm from Xiaomi.
For the most part though, I think the android versions they use are generally very old.
Ah that's a shame, if there's no guarantee of any kind of ongoing support then it's just ewaste-in-waiting
Meh, Supernote could shutdown tomorrow or upgrade to Android 16 and neither would change anything about how I use it. They also made the internals of this generation replaceable.
That's good. My concern is generally with security updates but I guess it really depends what you're using the device for.
There is mobiscribe wave in both bw and color. The company is shutting down, so they're selling off their inventory for cheap. I bought a pen support bw notebook for $100 and a color pen supported notebook for $170.
Apparently not for Europe
You weren’t kidding. The bw one went from 129 usd to 270 euro even before shipping costs were added.
Simply switching countries from USA to Netherlands.
Boox has a few. I like mine.
Some Kindles. I know mine can be flashed to full Android instead of the stripped-down version it runs now, but I wouldn't want to do that because it would run so much slower and have terrible battery life.
Current eink devices are much more responsive than older ones, so there were definitely some improvements over the years, we need some more decades for this technology to become a viable alternative in the devices like this.
If there was more demand for it, I doubt it would take decades.
I wish they could be like overclocked to make the most of one if you're stuck with a mediatek chip device. I got a new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite several months back and yeah it was very cheap but its SOOO sluggish! Lag lag lag for almost every single thing! I'm considering selling it off unless I can manage to find a GSI build because all of the few ROMs that were posted for it are not online anymore. If I can manage to find anything it could be made to perform quite well, but as it is with Samsung's awful One-UI it can literally sometimes not handle entering the settings app!