After a bit over 1 month with the Kompakt I would like to post a review of the various functionalities together with some features that would be really great to add in future updates. I understood there would be a feedback email but I don’t think I received one so this is in lieu of that.
Overall I have really enjoyed the journey. I think it helps that in preparation for the phone’s arrival I dumbed down my smartphone a lot for several months and tried to absolutely minimise my usage so it wasn’t as much of a culture shock.
I’m at the point where most days I only carry the Kompakt, and although my phone habits had already gotten a lot better with my dumbing down of the smartphone, it is definitely a nice feeling that I would recommend if people are prepared for the shift.
For the rest of the post I’ll go through various functionalities/apps and list the things I liked and/or think could be improved.
Physical attributes
It’s weightier than I expected but I don’t think this is a bad thing. Size is good. Battery life is decent, I typically get around 4-5 days with average use. I have not sideloaded any apps.
Display
Overall really like this, the eink is an obvious draw. I’ve had strangers approach me to comment on this.
- It would be nice to have some button combination that performs a refresh to get rid of any ghosting.
- I use the display without a backlight, but when it’s dark the method to turn on the backlight involves going through menus which I can’t see without a light - could we have a key combination that turns the backlight on?
- Like others have mentioned, I would prefer the lock screen to not have a logo.
Can the time be displayed in 24h format?
Phone/SMS
Sound quality is good so far as I can tell.
- Typing is a bit slow, there seems to be a delay from when I open the chat window to when my keystrokes register, meaning that the first few letters of the first word are missed and I have to go back. Also it would be nice if word completion automatically added a space.
- I’m not sure how voicemail notifications work but I appear to have missed one.
- When offline+ is on, texts I receive in that time seem to not come through until much later (eg I turn off offline+ and then 5 hours later I get a text that was sent during that time). This makes it a bit difficult to trust using the feature so I haven’t as much.
- When a chat is open and a new text comes in, the interface seems to automatically scroll to the latest text, making it difficult to refer to previous parts of a conversation while the other person is actively sending messages. It might be better to keep the focus where the user has it but add a symbol to indicate there is something new at the bottom, that I could click on to snap to.
Alarm
- Like others I’ve had the issue where the alarm goes off late, again makes it slightly hard to rely on.
- There should really be a timer and stopwatch included in the alarm app.
Calendar
- Given that it doesn’t sync with external calendars, I have not been able to use this sadly. Could we please have google calendar integration/importing?
Camera
I don’t use this much but I actually like it for what it is, would be nice to have video but personally I don’t consider this important.
E-reader
I haven’t really used this that much but I did notice a couple of points.
- The scrolling is a bit sensitive, I was trying to read a somewhat wordy pdf (think like a contract) and it was hard to centre. Also when you zoom it clips things outside of frame, there is no method I could find to increase the text size and have things automatically resize.
- I can’t figure out how to delete the files it came with.
- Actually more generally to the above point, I can’t figure out how to delete files on device (the only way this works is by using OpenMTP, but ideally I would want to delete a file on the go).
- I feel like e-reader should have the option to increase the default lock screen display timeout.
Maps
As others have said, this is unfortunately pretty much unusable in its current state.
- Constant refresh means it’s really hard to look at and hard to place a pin.
- No turn by turn directions even for walking routes.
- Search doesn’t seem to find most POI (in the UK at least), and even those it does I can’t find any information about like opening hours. I’m not sure how Light’s directory tool works but this would be more useful.
Meditation
I don’t really use this except in an attempt to replace the lack of timer, however given you can’t set arbitrary times to count down this doesn’t really work as intended for me.
Music
I have actually appreciated getting away from streaming and being forced to upload only what I want more intentionally.
- As everyone else has said, playlists would be a key feature here.
- I have it on shuffle but occasionally when I start it up it shows it is in shuffle mode but actually plays the songs in order.
- It would be nice to have a repeat track mode.
- For songs with long titles, I don’t see any way of seeing the end of them.
- Similarly to the e-reader, I can’t delete files while staying on device.
Notes
I haven’t really used this much.
- It would be nice to be able to import/export from a computer, I read that others are having issues with that.
Weather
Simple but actually really clean.
- It would be nice for it to auto refresh to the current date/time when opening the app for the first time in a while, otherwise it can be a bit confusing. Alternatively to display somewhere the date/time that is being referred to.
Offline+
As I mentioned above, I haven’t really used this feature due to worries about missing notifications. It would also be nice to be able to configure which things are turned off (eg keep bluetooth).