Dear Muditas,
here is sort of a review, after ca. six weeks of use. I was diving all-in, no other phone in parallel.
Preliminary information: I come from a Nokia 100, which has served me well for over 10 years. I do own a smartphone, but it is in Flight Mode plus WiFi all the time, so it is only connected when I am at home or in the office. I am offline on the road. Another use case is in holidays to have internet access, and for offline navigation using OsmAnd. I do not use so-called “social media”.
And: Thanks a lot for your effort to design and produce a mobile phone! This is quite an achievement. My review tries not to devalue this fact, but to put focus on the flaws that keep me from being 100% content with the use of this tool for telecommunication.
- Positives:
- Hardware feels nice, a little bigger than expected.
- Big plus is the nice display.
- Sympathetic company and nice-ish philosophy (albeit a little bit too much of “mindfulness” talk).
- Dedicated offline-button is a nice idea.
- Syncable address book (purchase reason compared to Nokia)
- Tethering and using the phone as a modem with a laptop works well. (purchase reason compared to Nokia)
- Mudita Center (MC) support for Linux
- Ability to write SMS in MC and copy & paste information from and to text messages. Big Win!
- Negatives:
- The offline-button is too easy to move. Happens by accident far too often when kept in pocket.
- The software (MuditaOS) feels pretty much alpha.
- No network in my office, a little too much “radiation reduction”. Ymmv
- MANY crashes, unable to pick up calls, buttons not responding, unable to restart without removing the battery, happens every 2-3 days (a no go)
- Sometimes SMS messages do not arrive completely, on Nokia it said (Textteile fehlen) aka. (Parts missing), which then later arrived. No dice on Mudita. (a no go)
- No network connection, display shows two bars…
- Battery life is poor (~2-3 days) compared to Nokia (~10 days)
- unusable music player (stops playing when doing something different on the phone like texting)
- No T9 texting, but I heard it is being implemented soon. Not much of a problem though.
- No ringtone which actually rings… And it is far too little loud in it’s maximal setting. I personally think a ringtone needs to be somewhat noisy and hearable, I do not need some meditation guitar music when my phone needs my attention. I still could use the Do Not Disturb mode if I wanted to relax. I miss a lot of calls in noisier environments.
- Interface: Network strength would be nice to see on every screen, not only on the home screen.
- Interface: Turning on the backlight on incoming calls would greatly improve the experience, you could see who’s calling when its dark outside…
For now I keep on using it, my kids got used to: Oh, dad’s offline, so he’s in the office! So they call me on the land line…
Thanks for your effort and keep on working on the usability features in software. Maybe one day there could be a firmware update to slightliy increase the network connectivity, using 17 times less radiation than my Nokia is impressing, but if 12 times less would make it possible to use the phone in the office, I would go for that option…
Kind regards
frank