While I ordered my kompakt on indigogo as a supporter, its only been in the past week that I was able to make the full leap and switch this over to being my primary phone. Part of this was due to some circumstances in my life , but others were a direct result of handwear failures with the device I’ll get into later.
In general, for what I wanted out of this phone I’m very satisfied with my experience. Like many, the constant ping from different social media apps all vying for my attention got to be too much. This device provides just enough flexibility to stay connected in the ways modern life demands, but just as many limitations to ensure that connection is secondary to my presence in everyday life. The display and build quality all feel very nice, especially the texture of the screen. the UI is simple, charming, and easy to navigate; if not a little limited.
While I hope to not come off as rude, I have had some negative experiences that are worth discussing because I enjoy the product and I would like to see future products like this succeed and give an honest impression for anyone considering buying. My biggest gripe was with the incomplete OS at launch, many apps were missing basic functionality, Bluetooth connectivity was missing features to make the function useable, and the companion computer software felt empty . It seemed like that the phone needed 3-6 months longer in development and the product was rushed out before it was truly ready. While this certainly soured my initial impressions, recent updates have rectified many of these issues but have been slow to do so. Second biggest issue is with stability. My phone encountered a malfunction which rendered it completely in operable and required repairs which took about a month. The support team was very kind, but clearly overburdened with requests, it was hard to get through to them. The whole experience was very frustrating but I don’t blame anything other than the device needing more time to get debug testing done before launch.
General assessment, is that the team is small and made some mistakes that are easy to make as a small team, especially when it seems like the device surpassed a lot of expectations for popularity. While on the consumer end it was annoying, I understand the people behind it are really trying and I appreciate all the work that has gone into fixing so many of the issues with the device. A point of feed back I’d even give is that it doesn’t seem like the team even realizes the type of general popularity this device could have, especially among younger people. I think that is reflected in the the marketing/some of the design decisions which from my perspective, cater to a generation that remembers a time before smartphones dominated all spheres of life and wants to bring some of that simplicity back, rather than the generation who has grown up with nothing but technology, is accustomed to some of it’s conveniences, but is trying to escape some of the harms it’s had on them. I’m 22 and a line cook, very active socially, party, ect… and very much not what the target audience is presented as yet I love the phone and so many of my friends/co workers do too and are even interested in getting one.
I also think that this gives me some perspective on specific features that people my age love and use.
- A dedicated timer feature in the alarm app, very useful when cooking or at work.
- The ability to manually sort the order favorite contacts are displayed
- The ability to have an emoji as the first character in a name, but still be able to search just the name and have it show up (i.e. name:
noah search:noah ) - The option to receive push notifications from the calendar about up coming events
- different memory states for audio level when connected to headphones, and Bluetooth devices so it remembers that the ringer is turned down when wearing headphones, but loud when just in my pocket (super annoying when at work and connected to the speaker to play music and the ringer is still turned up and blasts all my co workers)
- When you are in an open text thread and you receive a new message from the person you are texting, do not play the ring tone for every message they send, maybe just a new sound effect?
Just to round it out, I’m looking forward to the next while I have this as my only phone. It’s been a good week so far with it and I’m excited for the time it’s already created for me to do random little projects instead of just scroll (Like write this review :0 ). to any devs who might read this I hope the feed back was constructive and not harsh (not my intent) and what yall put out is really cool. Definitely easy to critique from the sidelines but actually building this from the ground up is clearly a lot of work and I’m very happy with my product! (P.S. please please please put a warm back light in the next version cause this blue LED is killing me hahah)
And yes, the warm backlight request is very much noted! You’re not the first one give us this request.