Hi all,
Introduction
After a few weeks of usage of my Mudita Kompakt as my primary phone, I would like to share some feedback.
I am generally happy in terms of spirit and behavioral changes. It clearly had the positive impact I expected in my personal life, coming from an iPhone.
I also want to state that my individual experience is unlikely to be like yours. Reading here from time to time, it’s important to realize that people use “lighter” phones for many, many different reasons. One word on my personal reasons: it’s not about social media, it’s about spending less time on screens, especially when there is not a reason to (while with friends, family etc).
I don’t use social media, now I do everything I can on my laptop so my phone is mostly for calls and text and messaging apps that I (try) to use on desktop anyway.
The Good
I find the screen quite good. Coming from 120Hz screens, I was afraid of the latency induced by e-ink displays, but I could deal with it. Some ghosting happens from time to time, when it’s too terrible my trick is to just lock/unlock for a full screen refresh.
I’m happy that we can sideload apps, my main use case of a phone is communication, and that includes modern apps like WhatsApp and Signal. That was a criteria, but both migrations went seamlessly, using the official apks.
One of my greatest fear was the photo quality, but it’s actually reasonably good. The camera cannot focus, which leads to some blurry pictures, so far I made peace with it.
The chess app is a nice touch.
I have been using Apple AirPods for calls, without issues so far.
The Missing Nice To Have’s
I would love to be able to record videos. Capturing moments in video is sometimes unique, and I really wish it was possible.
The keyboard is usable, but could really get improvements. Main one would be smarter suggestions, I personally worked on such systems and in 2026 it is very easy to do much better. Sending messages is an absolute core feature, so the typing experience should be one of the top priorities.
- double space = dot
- suggestions resistant to typos
- frequently used words = higher rank in suggestion
- pressing not long enough to open the accent menu also types the unaccented letter, which is very annoying
- swiping
Being able to rename the phone name (for Bluetooth device discovery) would be nice.
Payments and NFC features. Not critical at all.
I have an ongoing issue with syncing WhatsApp desktop on macOS, at this stage I’m not sure if the problem is a settings problem, an Android problem or a Mudita problem.
The Bad
The battery seems to be draining. I never got close to the advertised 6 days, I made it to 3 days using it barely. Not only this is very frustrating, but the main problem is that I don’t have access to the data that could help me better manage the battery. I have no idea what drains it the most, which apps, which systems, and it’s very frustrating to not be able to adapt my usage by knowing where the leaks are.
On the battery, the phone is getting very hot on wireless charging, I’m worried this would alter the performance of the battery and the phone.
I know for a fact that I have experienced missing texts, but I’m not sure about the extent of the issue. This is extremely problematic. A phone has 2 core features: calling and texting. If one of these is not behaving 100% perfectly, this is a problem, and one Mudita should care with the highest priority. Maybe it’s a hard problem, maybe not, but we should be getting weekly OS updates about attempts to fix the problems if necessary, this is important.
Contact management is terrible. I cleaned up a lot my VCF files to have a super clean import via the Mudita Center, but after the initial import:
- all phone numbers seem to be recorded as “Other”, and not “Mobile” or “Home”
- most contacts got duplicated, sometimes with no apparent distinction
- I received texts from the same person, same number, but it created 2 different conversations (maybe an SMS issue rather than a contact issue, but still weird)
I really wish we could have a Mudita Center visual option to (bulk) edit contacts on the phone, especially during the setup process.
I have an issue with notifications. My phone rings when there is apparently nothing happening on it. I check all (my three…) texting apps, and nothing. No new message, I have no clue why the phone rings.
To this date, I could not migrate my banking system. I don’t blame Mudita for it, I blame my banks, but it tends to be a problem I still need to solve somehow.