At the time of considering “well-made dumbphones” I ditched Punkt because of my low tolerance for the price at that time, Signal app issues (that was a big pain point, I’d be better off not having Signal so not having to try using it) and how long it can work on a battery vs its price point and low app energy footprint. Not gonna lie, E3270 was a reference point for me back then - it easily had 3-4 weeks of battery on a single charging cycle. Now I realized why I’m so sensitive about battery - my personality is “wired” as whimsical and carefree as regards organizational style and without a cable in the car, my smartphone would be mostly dead lol.
But the devil is in the details, I had phones with T9 that sucked when it was about typing. Or the new HMD’s “Banana phone” powered by KaiOS that didn’t have basic words in Polish like “Cześć” (“Hi”) and didn’t allow to add any new words to the dictionary.
Forget it. I bought the MP02 twice. On both devices, the keyboard was defective after less than nine months. You had to press some keys several times before they responded. You often read about this problem on the internet. Otherwise, it’s a nice little minimalist device that I was happy with, but at that price, I can’t afford to buy a new MP02 every year! In general, I agree with what has already been said here: today’s dumbphones or minimalist phones are simply too expensive and have too many problems for the price. When I think of my Nokia 3310, I bought it new and used it for almost 15 years! And it never caused me any problems whatsoever.
I have had the MP02 for more then 5 years. One of the first batch.
Battery range was about 5-6 days before I tried Signal.
But your Nokia don’t have it, right?
Right that Pigeon drains the battery. Don’t know if it is better now that it is integrated.
Have had the keyboard issue at the end. Phone died after a drop.
Now they are built in Europe, perhaps they’ve solved the keyboard issue?
Good for them, personally I spent too much money and time on MK and accepting its flaws to now just start over.
Their website states the secure smartphone is manufactured in Europe, MP02 specs still claim China.
Hi ! I have owned and used this very same Nokia 2660 Flip 4G for about 3 years. I have tried other similar models.
This piece of gear is IMHO just barely useful. It did work for me in the end, but I have to tolerate and work around tons of issues.
For instance, many SMS would not be sent without warning.
Very frequently the content of a message would be entirely replaced by “@@@@@@@@@” ; I worked around it by changing the encoding (but now many accents / special charaters are not transmitted anymore, which is an issue for me - French language.
For some reason, I frequently have to remove the country code otherwise sending messages would fail.
The camera is horrible and the pics are randomly sorted which is a PITA each time I have to attach pictures.
There are numerous consistency / refresh issues when using the contact book. Many inconsistencies in the UI which leads to losses of time for simple actions.
Sometimes it crashes. The audio player is very minimalistic (cannot browse files in drawers, just a slow linear list you have to go through each time or manual playlists) and supports few formats… The Bluetooth audio works properly with half of my devices.
It is impossible (!!!) to set the alarm volume so I had to modify the files on the PC otherwise it would ring at full volume.
There is no whitelist or possibility to detect SPAM so I had to select a default “silent” ringtone and set custom ringphones for all my contacts.
I forgot ! I have to constantly delete my messages as they fill the memory very quickly.
etc etc etc.
So. This is a horrdendous device. I worked around all issues and stuck to it because smartphones are inherently harmful to me, due to the way I have dealt with screens in the past 4 decades (!) - I just cannot focus when they are around - I have been constantly struggling. Even before the Internet.
And it applies to most / all HMD/pseudo Nokia dumbphones. Impossible to trust this kind of company !
