I returned recently from a several-day group tour of India and Nepal. I carried a de-Googled Google Pixel 6 with me, mostly as a compact way to capture photos and videos when I did not want on a given day to hang a digital camera around my neck. But, having followed the Mudita Forum announcements about the Kompakt for many weeks before the trip, I often wondered during the trip what it would have been like to carry a Kompakt with me instead of – or in addition to – my Pixel 6. Here are some Kompakt-related lessons that I learned on the trip.
1. My smartphone display’s color cues helped slightly with readability when it was in bright sunlight, but color was stressfully distracting otherwise. The Kompakt would have given me superior sunlight-readability without that distraction.
Grayscale mode on my Pixel 6’s display would have worked well indoors, but I found that I needed the extra cues that I got from colors when trying to read such a display in the bright sunlight of India and Nepal. Unfortunately, leaving the display in color mode led me to stressful distraction when I took the Pixel 6 out of the sun. The Kompakt would have given me the best of both worlds: super-readable in bright sunlight AND non-distracting indoors.
2. Color-mode photo galleries on traditional smartphones are easily distracting, so a grayscale photo gallery in the Kompakt would have been a welcome relief.
Having my Pixel 6’s display in color mode made me appreciate just how distracting a photo gallery can be. I caught myself on the tour bus too many times skimming through the gallery of colorful photos that I had just taken in India or Nepal instead of looking out the bus window at what we were passing or instead of listening to our tour manager tell us about the current locale. So, I like that the Kompakt has a camera that shoots 8-megapixel photos (not significantly smaller than the 9MP photos that I shot with my Pixel 6) AND that the Kompakt’s grayscale photo gallery cannot be anywhere as distracting as a photo gallery in color mode.
3. The tour manager of our India/Nepal trip assumed that each of us on the tour had a smartphone for an administrative task, and the Kompakt would have been sufficient for that task.
Two different security checkpoints at the Mumbai international airport required that I display to a security agent either a paper printout of or a digital photo of the details of my outgoing flight to Nepal. Our tour manager had those details on his own multi-page printout for all of us on the tour, but he did not have a separate printout of each traveller’s details for each of us. So, he asked each of us to use our smartphones to photograph digitally our respective portions of his printed Mumbai-to-Kathmandu flight-booking details. Each of us then used our smartphones to display our own flight-booking details at those two security checkpoints. The details were in black & white, so the E Ink display of the Kompakt would have been sufficient for displaying my flight-booking details to the security agents.
4. The absence of WhatsApp and an email client on the Kompakt would not have been a problem in this emergency-dental-care story from India.
Quoting from the results of a search for “how to email from MMS” on the Brave browser:
Some carriers and providers offer SMS/MMS[-]to[-]email gateways. These gateways convert MMS messages into email format, allowing you to send MMS messages via email. You can check with your carrier or provider to see if they offer such a service.
A fellow American traveler on my India/Nepal trip needed emergency dental care while in India. The dentist in India assumed that she had WhatsApp when she first called from her (Google Android) smartphone to his smartphone. This was obvious when he asked her to use WhatsApp to send a photo of her mouth before her visit to his office (as he wanted to be sure that he could help her on our tight travel schedule). An Indian friend in the USA told me before my trip that “everyone” in India uses WhatsApp instead of MMS, so this request by the dentist did not surprise me. My Canadian friends use WhatsApp instead of MMS, too. But, if I were the one who had that dental emergency in India AND I were carrying a Kompakt on the trip, then I would have used the Kompakt to take the photo of my mouth and then could have used MMS on the Kompakt to email that photo to the dentist. If my international-roaming plan supported SMS but not MMS, then I would have used my Pixel 6 to take the photo of my mouth and then would have used an email client on the Pixel 6 tethered to the Kompakt to email that photo to the dentist.
Yeah I really hope whatsapp never finds its way on to this device, deal breaker for me, left them long time ago, owned by facebook and they sell your data…NO THANKS
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
It just confirms what I think about color screens - they are the sole reason hooking people to their devices, especially children.
Like moths to the light, children cannot stay away from the super flashy colors of screens. That’s what hooks them so much to mobile devices or cartoons on TV.
But adults get hooked to it as well, among with the mental stimulation of easy digital entertainment.
There is this problem which exists when using a smartphone with a color screen - after looking away from the screen, the real life colors look dull. What a disappointment real life becomes just because of this little fact!
Turning the screen to grayscale is the only sensible choice to avoid this effect.
I’m not particularly fond of the coming of color e-ink. Right now, they are still okay because the colors are dull. As long as the screens stay more boring than real life, it’s fine.
Now, concerning the WhatsApp, the use case in your story made me laugh. A dentist demanding photos of teeth through WhatsApp is so absurdly ridiculous, I don’t even feel commenting on this.
Maybe it’s unfair to say this, but I assume it is just a business practice to cherrypick their customers.
I do not think it is critical and finding a dentist without selfie demands should be possible.
That’s how I survive without WhatsApp, I just ignore it. People are just afraid to let go, that’s why they keep demanding it.
There are two use cases for WhatsApp in my life. It’s a neighborhood group and a study group.
Nothing useful ever gets posted on the latter.
The neighbor group is a more sensible matter. One can indeed miss some useful information on there. The really important things get around offline too though, and just talking to the neighbors more in real life is the obvious solution.
@kirkmahoneyphd Thank you for sharing your detailed experience and Kompakt-related reflections from your trip to India and Nepal! It’s fascinating to see how you compared the functionality of your de-Googled Pixel 6 with what the Kompakt could offer in those scenarios.
As for the practicality of using the Kompakt for administrative tasks like displaying flight bookings, I think the fact that the eBook reader can display PDF files is really cool. I check in online (on a laptop) for my flights & usually print my boarding pass - it’s a habit. I like to have a physical paper card.
One thing I’m gonna ask our team, how I could upload pdfs to Mudita Kompakt.
For the record, I will never use WhatsApp, as I know how privacy-invading Meta is. Plus, there is always an alternative to WhatsApp, even if many people cannot see one. But, as my Indian friend in the USA, who travels yearly to India, told me, people in India use WhatsApp instead of MMS. So, it was natural for the dentist in that anecdote to assume that my fellow traveller from the USA had WhatsApp on her smartphone. He was not cherry-picking patients by asking her to use WhatsApp to send a mouth photo to him. He was expediting his ability to answer whether he could help her within her tight travel schedule, and WhatsApp was his natural-to-him assumption about how to get the photo.
Here is what four major cellular carriers in India say about MMS:
Same here, I will never use whatsapp ever again, people need to wake up and understand what meta is about, they aren’t here to make the world a better place, profit is all that matters to them
I do not believe that WhatsApp users in India will “wake up” (as you wrote). Check out this response that I got by entering “number of WhatsApp users in India” in a Brave browser:
WhatsApp Users in India
Based on the provided search results, the number of WhatsApp users in India has been reported as follows:
390.1 million (as of 2023)
532.2 million (as of 2024)
400 million (as of July 2019, with a growth rate of 16.6% from the previous year)
Additionally, WhatsApp has confirmed that India has the largest number of monthly active users, with over 596.6 million users as of 2024.
@kirkmahoneyphd
I think in Europe, Whatsapp have basically replaced texting.
The numbers in some countries are staggering. Take Spain for example- About 49M people. Out of 49M people 33 million are using WhatsApp- So you’ve got over 67% of the population using Whatsapp.
Update to my story: I just learned from that fellow traveller that the dentist did not even ASK her whether she had WhatsApp! Instead, he simply looked up her inbound-call CTN in WhatsApp and sent her a message in WhatsApp, asking her for a photo of her mouth.
I recently had a conversation with someone about Mudita Kompakt, and I was commenting about how, just like with PURE, there were all these questions about Whatsapp, Spotify, GoogleMaps, Messenger, FB, Signal, Telegram, YT, browser etc…Any app that’s out there, there was a question if the phone will have it, because, in their eyes, that would make the phone BETTER & more usable for THEM.
Then my friend commented: You know, I think people confuse the word ‘BETTER’ with convenience. That just really stuck with me.
Everything that’s convenient is not always necessarily better.
I’m a bit in-limbo with the idea of WhatsApp coming to these middle phones that bridge smartphones and dumb phones. I hate that WhatsApp was sold and bought out by Facebook and I don’t support them at all. I barely even go on my Facebook and have thought about deactivating mine for awhile.
I understand though, prior to Facebook buying it, it was such a wonderful way to communicate with those overseas without having to spend a ton of money. It was a “free” way of communication, and it was encrypted! However, fast-forward to today without the original owners, the population that uses it has grown quite a bit and now like previously mentioned, a lot of people rely on that as communication, completely ditching texting (in other countries outside of U.S.).
I understand that there’s RCS coming, and I understand now there are multiple ways such as Beeper (one way, there’s another as well) to communicate though different apps. Honestly, I think the solution here is the creation of own app that uses one of these methods to connect with WhatsApp or Signal, or whatever, without having to download the app itself. And somehow, keeping privacy and encryption on the Light/Kompakt side. I see this as the solution, just up to the companies to figuring out the best way for them to do it.
It’s kind of a shame how much other countries rely on WhatsApp, but if Light and Mudita find a way to do what I said, then at least you can communicate, without having to download the app.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on WhatsApp and its integration into minimalist phones. I understand your concerns about Facebook’s acquisition and the implications for privacy and data security. Many people share your hesitation about using services owned by large tech companies.
It’s important to note that the Mudita Kompakt does not come with WhatsApp installed, and if you prefer not to use it, you don’t have to. This allows you to maintain your preference for privacy and avoid apps you’re uncomfortable with.
However, it’s worth recognizing that in many European countries, WhatsApp has become the primary means of communication, effectively replacing traditional texting. For instance:
Germany: 53.1 million users
United Kingdom: 41.4 million users
Italy: 37.5 million users
Spain: 32.6 million users
This represents a significant portion of the population in these countries. WhatsApp isn’t just a messaging app there—it’s deeply integrated into daily life, from personal chats to business communications.
Given this widespread adoption, having access to WhatsApp can be essential for staying connected, especially if you have friends or family overseas. While alternatives like RCS and apps like Beeper offer promising solutions, they might not have the same level of ubiquity or cross-platform compatibility at this time.
I agree that finding a way to maintain privacy and encryption while enabling communication on platforms like WhatsApp is crucial. I think this could be an option for us explore innovative methods to bridge this gap, allowing users to connect without compromising their principles or privacy.
Ultimately, the choice remains with you. Since Mudita Kompakt doesn’t require you to use WhatsApp or any other app you might be uncomfortable with, you can continue to communicate in ways that align with your values.
Balancing the need for privacy with the realities of global communication is certainly a challenge, but open dialogue and collaborative efforts can help us move toward solutions that respect both our values and our need to stay connected.
