I know I’ll get a lot of pushback for this, but to me, the Mudita Kompakt is just too slow. I’ve been using it for a few months now.
I realize “slow” isn’t a precise metric, but it simply lacks snap. Even calm, black-and-white, animation-free apps can be quick and responsive. What really gets to me is when I try to open something like the map, or camera, or WhatsApp (forget heavier apps like a browser…)— it’s unusable. Not that it’s a bad thing in itself, but… at this price, we could expect a bit more performance.
It’s my one regret. I’m all for minimalism, but waiting for something as basic as letters to appear on the screen when typing feels, frankly, ridiculous. If you’re going to strip features down to the essentials, don’t let speed and responsiveness be the sacrifice. Slowness isn’t a virtue here, in my opinion.
I usually want to do the thing on my phone i’m here to do, as fast as possible, so i can get back to my life off screen.
Sorry for the rant, but it’s been genuinely frustrating for me.
A bit more processing power would’ve been nice but keeping it sluggish might be part of their minimalist ethos. I wonder how they balance what to remove so it doesn’t become so minimal it’s useless.
I agree! For example the Viwoods Reader is a eink device with insanely smooth eink refresh mode and also has a meditatek g99 and 4gb ram (its cellular too) and its under $300. I paid 230 with a promo they had. For the price of the mudita it should have had at least those similar specs. Its a night and day difference between those devices. I think it would certainly help if they can give us a proper fast mode as the panel is capable of much higher speeds but would require them to improve the eink driver. I love the mudita’s size but just need faster eink speeds at least as it would really help the typing experience.
Video of them side by side https://youtube.com/shorts/mb4EWPPFBq4
I agree that the Kompakt could be a faster. When I first started using it, I was frustrated a lot with how much slower it is when all I wanted to do was get the text typed and sent. Now I’m used to it and it works fine as long as I keep things simple. But I can see a device like the Kompakt will not be adopted widely because it’s slower.
It has full phone capability but no speaker so you have to use either wireless or wired headphones/speaker. It only oddly has a built in mic. I just was comparing the 2 because viwoods offers alot at a cheap price. I wish it had a speaker though. Boox btw just enabled full phone/sms support on their palma 2 pro though. That has a speaker/mic/camera. You have to install the dialer/sms yourself.
I read your messages and I wonder whether the lag is due to a lack of performance of the phone or only an issue of screen refreshing rate… I don’t even believe scrolling a text make the phone lag.
So the question may be: how to increase the screen refreshing rate to get things smoother?
This issue seems to be in the roadmap:
That’s understandable! I personally never had to warranty my boox monitors at all so don’t have experience with that.
I use to have a aipaper which was very nice but way too big. I wish I would have gotten the aipaper mini lol.
I have my main SIM card in my mudita kompakt but yes I also have a helium sim card in my viwoods reader that I use as a phone with wired earbuds sometimes. I did install T-Mobile digits on it so that I can also receive my main phone number calls/texts through it too. The digits thing was tricky to get going, can go into detail if anyone else is curious. 2 other flaws with it are that the wifi/bt auto turns off after 30sec of sleeping but I found an adb command to disable that. The other issue is they have a strict notification block for installed apps (sms/phone is ok) so I had to create my own magisk module to patch it to re enable notifications. After all that I can say it definitely makes the experience much better!
The screen performance isn’t due to the system lagging it’s just a limitation of the device with its current eink driver. The roadmap mode switching I actually have manually triggered and there isn’t a mode that’s faster sadly. Unless they plan to enhance the fast mode than that would be amazing.
Why would the wifi turn off automatically? I think I have a setting on my mini that turns off sleep mode. I would personally love to get the viwoods reader as a phone because I love my experience with the mini My main concern would be the speaker. Is there a headphone jack on it? I usually hardly have my ringer on anyways … ahah. What do you mean by digits was tricky?
I had the regular viwoods but I didn’t like the writing feel on it and no backlight in case I needed it. Main complaint with the mini is no warm front light but can’t have everything!
I think they just thought it would be good for the battery since they intend it to be a ereader but obviously can do more than that lol. I did contact them about that and they were going to add a toggle that lets people enable/disable that easily but no new updates yet so I went ahead and turned it off myself with adb. Its definitely one of my favorite eink devices, I cant tell you how many devices I have had haha. There is no headphone jack but you can use type c wired ones. I personally use kz duet earbuds or the wired apple earpod ones with it. I also mainly dont use a ringer too but it does lack a vibrate motor too. I dont think it has gps either. I mainly just use it as a companion device to my kompakt so I can use all my apps smoothly. I do use it for calls on off though too. So I dont think the device passes the play integrity check so digits app for tmobile doesnt load but since I rooted it (super easy btw) I was able to install a microg magisk module which patches the integrity check im assuming and lets me sign into digits just fine. After that I just unload microg and digits continues working fine!
Oh yeah I forgot about the no front light on the big aipaper. Speaking of front light this reader only has a cool light but the recently released color version does have a warm light as well. I think they are releasing a new revision of the reader in January so might be best to wait. If I remember correctly they said the new revision will be able to dim lower or something.
