First days with Pure

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” :wink: )
  • 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.
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Thanks for your thoughts. Sad to hear the issues are in Europe as well.

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Sorry to hear these problems are not isolated to certain US carriers! Two things that are making me wait on ordering the Pure, are the call quality and battery life. For me, interpreting any language (including my own first language) requires a massive cognitive effort, and crystal-clear audio is essential for that. I’ve often ditched phones or network-providers because to me, all I could hear of the other person was the syllables, not the words.

I’m really eager to order the Pure, specifically for the e-ink, Low-SAR, offline simplicity (no sensory overload) and ability to compose SMS messages wired, via a computer keyboard. My two biggest requirements are good (non-smartphone) battery life, and excellent sound quality. After that, it’s composition of SMS on a computer, and bluetooth when in the modern car, so for 3 of my 4 key features to be incomplete, makes it a significant risk.

Fortunately it seems that some people are reporting reasonable call-quality, and battery-life is being addressed in each update - so hopefully, software-updates will fix most (or all) of these issues. As soon as people start reporting improvements, I will place my order. Seeing as you already have the Pure, I’d suggest perhaps having a little patience (for instance, saying, “I’ll give this phone x weeks/months to improve”) and frequently checking for updates in Mudita Center. Hopefully it will begin working well for you.

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@pki Thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate that you wrote such an extensive review. The good news is that many of the issues you reported will be addressed in a subsequent update. Our team member will reply to each point so you can have a clear picture as to how things will look like moving forward.

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No problem :slight_smile: I’m not going to send my Pure back. Will patiently wait for next software versions.

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I am facing similar experiences after playing around with my new Mudita Pure. Tethering as an example is essential for me to work with the Mutida Pure. Unfortunately, the connection breaks down within 1-2 seconds after establishing connectivity. I don’t know if this is because I use Linux as my OS, I think the soft modem function should work with the usual operating systems established on the market.
Another negative point is that the address book function obviously cannot access the contacts stored on the SIM card. Unfortunately.

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@andreas Thanks for the feedback. I will ask our team about the tethering issue and the address book issue as well.