Here are some notes from my first 2 days with Pure.
What I like is the case. Keyboard feels really good. Side button for quick switching between normal/do not disturb/airplane mode is a great idea.
The software clearly suffers from some child-age sickness. What I felt could be improved:
- cable thethering can only be enabled just after plugging the cable… there should be an option to enable it in settings
- great to have e-Ink screen, but font is too small for me, found no way to enlarge it (authentication codes sent by banks and other web sites are hardly readable for me)
- font rendering seems to be broken - there are artifacts on the boundaries of some characters (like dithering was attempted on a display which does not support grayscale).
- seems to me that backlight could be activated using ambient light sensor and/or day time rules, but I can either turn it on (so it consumes the battery even in daylight) or disable it (then screen is unreadable in darkness)
- text messages sent by alphanumeric senders: some sender addresses are incorrectly decoded (i.e. one popular Polish bank appears as “!X” )
- text message conversations need to be deleted one by one which is annoying if one gets a lot of spam: I’d love a feature to be able to select conversations (i.e. select some / select all) and then “delete selected”
- phone allows to insert 2 sim cards. It warns the user that only one can be active at a time, which is “fair enough”; still it could provide some feature to automatically associate a concrete sim card with some feature (i.e. could allow to set SIM2 to be always used for thethering / modem)
Above things are UX issues, so hopefully they can be addressed in some next software release. However there is some other stuff I find crucial which does not work for me correctly:
- audio call quality is really poor (either through built in speaker or attached headphones): during few conversations I had, the other partly was hard to understand, requested me a few times to repeat myself and complained for glitches / interruptions. I expected GREAT call quality from a phone with Mudita’s price tag and making calls as its core function, so I’m really disappointed with this.
- modem function and cable thethering do not work for me (I’m not on any of very popular OSes, so I did not expect broadband thethering to work, but still I’m disappointed that basic serial modem functionality is defunct)
- I’m not sure if bluetooth handsfree profile is supported, the phone refused to pair with my car system
- I felt like battery consumption is far to big for a phone with low power display and making calls as its primary feature (started my day fully charged, had only 2 bars left in the evening while having approx 35 minutes of telephone conversations during the day)
To sum up: with sadness I’m moving back to my previous phone for now (with hope that eventually most of issues gets resolved by some next software release).There are some “core” features I expect from my phone which I’m not going to give away:
- high audio call quality
- working handsfree connection to my car audio system
- ability to use it as a modem / internet router / whatever on a computer system I use for my daily work.