First week with HiSense A5

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With little disappointment in old Muditas phone software (More then antenna) and unable to pledge for Kompakt due to shipping restrictions, I decided to test my 2nd eink screen phone, after death of Yota 2.
I have selected cheap and availiable HiSense A5 with Play Store enabled.

Note that 500 USD was launch price and that phone is much much cheaper nowadays on ebay.

Pros

  • Eink screen is great for prolonged reading

  • 12Mpix camera give good shot and photo previews in grayscale are good

  • Bundled HiSense apps are nice, clean and eink optimised
    –Google Store was already enabled, so there was no need to sideload anything

  • I was able to sync my google account via Wi Fi and install most of same apps as on

  • NothingPhone 2a, except specific apps to NothingOS

  • Dub music player, Vivaldi, WriterP work flawlessly

  • Even paypal and telegram do well. Since I did not yet insert a SIM card I was unable to test

  • WhatsApp, Viber since they dont allow double use of same number, but they do install and work

  • Banking app works

  • Battery life on 4000 mah, plus ordinary saver and even super saver (like on Xiaomi) are excellent and make possible use for days

  • Speaker quality is good, Bluetooth works great

Cons - downsides

  • Dark themes dont work well on e-ink screen of this generation (neither did on first Muditas phone in beta)
  • Simply einks dont still have strong enough contrast, so I advise light themes
    • Maximum brightness and large fonts are applied well on Android apps, but many apps require indvidual setting
  • Phone comes with Android 9, which cannot be upgraded and is EOL on system updates, which i expected.
  • This is still good enough for all apps I use, but might limit phone in the future
  • Scrolling especially with battery saver is terrible (ghistiing) and use of games, VLC for videos and previewing recording of video is horrible on this generation of e-ink phones and highly not recommended. I believe this is why video recording is now disabled on Kompakt, rather then hardware limit

Mind that this is quite old phone in terms of chipset-CPU, RAM and Kompakt should have newer and better eink screen. However, many of eink screen limitations might remain, like ghosting and slow scrolling. I was aware of all this but I must say that Yota 2 did better job with completely black screen with white fonts and their widgets.

In conlusion, at least for people with impaired vision, higher PPI and black background of high contrast is needed as well as overall higher quality screen. This does not affect most of people.
Hope this helps to make expectations of Kompakt a bit more realistic. Mind that system optimised HiSense apps like clock, camera, messages and contacts work well with no need for Android doubles and they did not come with it,
Conclusion is that HiSense A5 can be effective secondary private phone, but isnt good enough for primary phone.
I hope eink screens will continue to evolve, as well as low SAR antennas and I hope one day some Muditas advanced dumbie will meet my desires :smiley:
All the best to Kompakt testers and users

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Thank you for the review.

These eink smartphones are so expensive. Hopefully there will be a bigger demand of the masses for eink smartphones in the near future so that the niche status ends.

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Lots of people have developed sensitivity to OLED screens and laptops’ mini-LED screens and even some LCDs, due to PWM (pulse width modulation) brightness control. Often they assume they are just “getting old” when they develop symptoms, even though they might be quite young when the sensitivity starts. If they know the truth, they will turn to e-Ink, rather than blame themselves.

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I am all in for e-ink since I had Yota Phone 2.
My only current problem is there contrast and brightness levels arent good enough for my eye condition

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