The phone is a pleasant size and shape in comparison to modern devices. Build quality is nice and everything works as well or better than I imagined it to.
I folded the little origami flower from the packaging. that was a nice touch! <3
Sideloading apps was easy. I just installed Signal and Davx5 to sync my contacts. Both work fine, but they are obviously not optimized for e ink.
The builtin apps work great but they are barebones. No contact syncing, music app only shows songs in alphabetical order, and no voicemail shortcut in the dialer. (I was able to add a contact for voicemail and add it to my favorites as a workaround.)
The headphone jack exists (!) and supports volume control and play/pause with an inline remote, but the music does not pause if the headphone plug is removed. The speaker on the phone gets loud.
A few improvements I’d like to see:
The lockscreen could show a slowly updating analog clock, or a “fuzzy clock” (“Seven O Clock”, “Half Past Seven”, “Quarter To Eight”, etc) or notifications, or something more useful than the Mudita Kompakt logo.
When the fingerprint sensor is brushed by anything, the screen wakes up to accept touches. That’s not great. An accidental emergency call could be placed.
There is a little LED light lit up by charging the phone, it would be great to see that used for notifications too.
it would be nice to swap out or add icons on the main homescreen. I’d like to have signal on the homescreen.
Is the OS open source? It would be nice to get at the code and potentially contribute.
Do software updates have to be done manually? I’m on 1.0.0, and the phone updater says it’s up to date.
Other than those minor complaints, I’m super happy with this. it’s basically perfect as is, and way smaller than the Cat S22 flip phone I was using! Thanks for a great product mudita.
@solv you dont update with Mudita Centre. If you go to manage apps in your settings you’ll find one called updater. It’s hidden by default. Hope that helps
Edit. Sorry, just read your first post saying your phone updater says your up to date. No idea then, sorry
Just wait a day or something. I checked a day later and got an 1.11.00 update. Keep cool and enjoy your device. I noticed no difference after the update
I share many of your suggestions and thoughts. Here are my initial thoughts:
I would likely fully switch for:
Group messaging & RCS. Frankly cannot use the phone until group messaging is available.
Navigation support (turn by turn, or even directions)
NFC (hopefully coming?)
Nice to have:
Ability to delete the music files (sorry, but I am not a fan of those provided, and I don’t see how to delete them in Mudita Center or on the phone)
Quick silent mode. The Offline side switch doesn’t silence sounds, as far as I can tell
Lockscreen with something other than logo
Sync calendar with my calendar app I use on every other device
Speech to text for SMS
Questions I need to answer by reading this forum:
Can I sync e-reader files from Kindle?
How does sideloading work?
How hard will it be for me to ditch my Authenticator apps for MFA, and go back to 2FA texts?
Literally less than 24 hours thoughts. I do like the form factor, the e-ink display, the aesthetics of the OS, and more. There are small usability changes I’d make to some of the interfaces (happy to discuss if anyone cares). Lots of goodness to be had. (I tried that Cat phone, too. Wayyyy too big!)
No, you can’t sync your Kindle files unless you sideload the Kindle app.
There’s some videos on YouTube and some links elsewhere on the forum that cover this. Basically you connect the phone to a computer, and use a terminal-based debugging interface to add apps to the phone. It’s not as intimidating as it may sound. Just a few quick commands (unless you’re on Linux, and then it’s a little more complex lol)
If you’re open to sideloading, there’s no reason to ditch your authenticator apps. Just find one that meets your needs (ideally from somewhere like f-droid.org) and use that.
Pocket is shutting down. I used Pocket’s sync with my kobo quite heavily and will miss it. So I’ve set up a wallabag server and use Koreader on my Kompakt to sync my wallabag articles. Almost as good as the kobo+pocket integration!
The camera is nice. I’ve been able to take a few outdoors photos on a walk with my family, and while they won’t win any quality awards, at least I can see what I’m taking a picture of in the sunlight.
The call quality and battery life are great, the size is great, and the fingerprint reader is great!
It would be nice to have Android’s native do not disturb feature. I am sometimes “on call” for work, and would like calls from favorites to ring, but not message notifications. Minor nitpicks, though. I’m really enjoying the Kompakt and will be using it for the foreseeable future!
