Review of the Mudita Kompakt
tl;dr: I like it! I’m keeping it.
The Screen:
The screen is one of the main reasons I bought this phone. I love that it works so well in so many different light conditions, from fairy lights at night in my bedroom reading e-books before sleep, all the way to bright sun reflecting off of snowy mountain summits or ocean water. With my old smartphone, I noticed that if I was using it for long periods of time, I would get eyestrain, same as I do with my laptop. I don’t remember having this problem in my younger years, but now that I’m in my 40s, it’s noticeable. I mostly keep the phone’s light turned off, and if I’m in my dark bedroom, I’ll just turn on my fairy lights if I want to read, and this has definitely helped with the eyestrain compared to staring directly into a lighted screen.
Phone:
Phone calls are loud and clear, whether on bluetooth, speakerphone, or holding against my face. All the functions I expect are there. The first time I put in my new SIM card, I got some error about being in airplane mode, which I wasn’t, and could not make or receive calls. However, after I turned the phone off, removed the SIM, then reinserted it the next day and turned it back on, everything worked, and has been working ever since.
SMS:
SMS, MMS and group and picture texts all work as expected. Picture texts will of course be in black and white – I’m still looking into ways to see them on my laptop for full detail/color, perhaps copying the picture to a Signal message to myself. I’ve asked folks to preferentially send pictures over email or Signal, but not everyone finds this workflow intuitive for them, when they’re accustomed to using iMessage with everyone they know. That’s fine, I can still see what someone has taken a picture of, even if it’s not in 4K 16 quadrillion colors. I don’t need my eyeballs to be in Las Vegas or Times Square all the time!
I disabled RCS on my previous (Android) phone before switching over to this one, since I read somewhere that that may be necessary.
I wanted to import my messages from my old phone to the Kompakt, so I installed SMS Import/Export from F-droid on both phones. I spent time going back through message history to delete any texts that weren’t with friends and family. Then I exported on the old phone to a microSD card, and inserted the card into the Kompakt. When I tried importing, once the phone locked the screen, I couldn’t unlock the screen, so I had no way of checking the progress of the import. After a couple hours I rebooted the phone to get access again, and it was clear that not all messages had been imported. I tried importing a second time, but this duplicated messages! So I had to delete all the messages, and try a third time, leaving it running over night while connected to a charging cord. Finally this time all the messages were imported successfully. There was also a funny bug where I couldn’t scroll up more than a few lines of messages before it would push me back down to the bottom, but after turning the phone off and on overnight (the magic fix for everything), scrolling worked correctly, and I haven’t seen that bug since then.
There are a couple features I think would be useful for the SMS app. One is a “Search” function to search through messages when one has a long message history. The other would be maybe a way for Mudita Center to interface with the SMS app to display messages, including picture messages in particular.
Camera :
I think this camera fits well in the context of being located on a phone. I have a friend who likes to take pictures of wildflowers with her iPhone, and it’s such a big hassle to get it to focus correctly on the flower, often the only way to get it to work is put your hand right behind the flower, but then you aren’t seeing the flower in its context, a meadow or forest. I have a manual mechanical film camera where you have full control over the focusing. There is no computer chip to do it for you. I love it. I line the flower up in the focusing prism, adjust the focus ring until it’s perfect, then take the shot. It’s always in focus, and it doesn’t mysteriously unfocus after you’ve set the focus, as smartphones do. It only takes a few seconds to get a good photo. I think this gets into the philosophy of minimal phones – all-in-one devices such as the iPhone can be a jack of all trades but a master of none. Likewise, with the Kompakt, I think it makes the assumption that if you’re serious about photography, you’re going to have a separate camera that is just a camera. So the quality of pictures that it takes is appropriate for a phone camera where you’re in a situation where all you have with you is your phone and you’d like a snapshot of something. For this purpose, it works very well. It doesn’t try to fool you into thinking you’re a professional photographer with AI and whiz bang ultra max lenses. If you have a good subject and composition, it will take a good photo. See the Kompakt Photography thread for examples.
One more point on philosophy – last night I tried taking pictures of falling snow at night using both my smartphone and my Kompakt, and neither turned out well. This was a reminder that there are simply some experiences whose beauty cannot be captured adequately with a camera, which must be directly experienced in the moment. Put the phone away. Look up. Enjoy life.
QR codes :
If I ever absolutely had to scan a QR code, I would deal with this by taking a picture of the QR code, plugging the Kompakt into my laptop, and feeding the picture into a QR scanner website. Another way to deal with this is simply googling whatever organization created the QR code, often the code just redirects to their website anyway. Yet another way to deal with this is to stop caring. Will this QR code really improve your life? Doubtful. Let it go. People caring about keeping up with the Joneses is how smartphone manufacturers got so much control over us, making us think we have to have the latest gadget just to be able to function in society. The truth is, you don’t need it. A busker has a QR code for tips? Last I heard they still accept cash. A restaurant or bar has a QR menu? Ask the human serving you what’s on the menu and what they recommend! Come on, this isn’t rocket science.
Photo Management :
Currently I just connect my Kompakt to my laptop, copy my photos to my laptop, which then gets encrypted and backed up to a cloud backup provider (everything, not just photos). It’s simple, and it doesn’t allow Google or Apple to pry into my private life. I know there are fancy things you can do with software like Immich, but that’s a layer of complexity I don’t want to deal with, even though I have the technical skills and hardware. I deal with enough IT in my day job. To share photos I just copy them into Signal chats or email them to people who don’t use Signal.
Network :
Coincidentally, my old carrier went out of business around the same time my Kompakt arrived. (Mobi, if you’re curious, it’s a sordid tale.) I didn’t find out until my phone stopped working and the customer service line had been disconnected. I talked with Verizon about it and they said if there’s no customer service, they can’t port the number. So I had to get an entirely new phone number. I showed him the Kompakt and he was really impressed with it, the e-ink screen in particular, but the serial number (or IMEI or whatever) wasn’t in their system, so he couldn’t put the SIM directly in my phone. I pulled out my old smartphone and he was able to put the new SIM in that, and he said the SIM could be transferred to other phones (hint hint). Lo and behold, yes, the Verizon prepaid plan SIM works when transferred from an “approved” smartphone. The 15GB plan should be plenty for the Kompakt.
Music :
This was another big reason I was interested in the Kompakt specifically. I wanted to put my SD card full of music into it, and plug my good headphones into it. (I’ve always hated Spotify. I mainly use Bandcamp and Bleep.) Oh my goodness. I haven’t been able to do this since my iPod died so many years ago. It’s amazing. The sound quality is so much better than what I get through any of those bluetooth pieces of crap. I’m so glad I can enjoy my music again without being chained to my computer. I had tried using dongles with my old smartphone but it was never ideal and eventually the connection between the USB-C port and the dongle got flaky, so I had to switch to bluetooth, which reduced the sound quality enough that I gave up on music and only used it for audiobooks and phone calls. The headphone jack on the Kompakt is a killer feature! I’m so happy!
The music app itself, as of the 1.4 OS update, is basically everything I need. The only possible feature improvement I can think of is to add a sleep timer.
E-reader :
I loaded my e-book collection onto the SD card, opened up the e-reader app, and it threw up a screen that said “Loading books…” for awhile. Finally it showed me all the books organized into a single Library, so finding a specific book generally required remembering the title and entering that into the search bar. The library seems to create titles from metadata rather than filenames, and I’ve noticed some of my documents/books have questionable metadata, so I’ll see something in the library named something like “Test” or “71061_B04” and I’m like “What is this?” On my computer (and, by way of copying, my SD card too), my e-books are organized with a folder structure based on genre and then author, roughly Dewey Decimal-ish, and this organization is not recognized in the e-reader app. It might be nice for the e-reader app to have a “Folders” tab similar to the Music app (where, again, my music is organized by genre, then artist; my apologies to all the cross-genre musicians).
The reading experience is certainly easier on the eyes compared to my laptop. I have never had a Kindle myself, but have tried others’ Kindles, and I can see how having a bit larger screen for a book is nice, depending on what kind of book it is and how many pictures it has. The tradeoff is that it becomes less portable. Even my smartphone often felt like it might snap in half, it was so big. So I like the Kompakt’s size. It just means I have to turn the pages more frequently, and that’s fine.
Navigating PDFs is a bit clunky and slow, but PDFs are generally designed for a full size sheet of paper or a big desktop monitor, rather than a phone screen, so you can’t really expect a document designed for a large screen to look good and be easy to navigate on a small screen.
Coming back to the subject of lifestyle and philosophy, I’d spent 40 years collecting (physical) books and couldn’t bear to let go of any of them. This presented many problems that grew and grew over time – moving became more and more difficult, having space for them all became more and more challenging, and finally I noticed my allergies were aggravated by all the old paper. So I got e-book versions of everything, donated all the physical books, and now I’m down to just one bookshelf of things that have no e-book version. I now have the peace of mind that I can still read and access any of those books, but they no longer literally tower over me. The Kompakt is a key piece of this de-cluttering puzzle. Spending too much time reading on my laptop hurts my eyes, as mentioned earlier, and I dunno, I just prefer the Kompakt to a Kindle, it’s just one device I can bring with me to read at night when I’m camping in the mountains where every ounce/gram counts. So, thank you Kompakt, you’ve helped me climb out from under the weight of mountains of books!
Maps and GPS :
As has been described elsewhere, the GPS on the Kompakt doesn’t have (creepy) tricks up its sleeve for dealing with being indoors without a direct line of sight to a satellite. Does anyone know if it’s possible to manually enter an address as the starting point of a route? That may be one way to deal with not having a GPS signal, but tapping on “Current location” in the starting point box doesn’t seem to bring up any manual text entry.
Other than that, the Maps app seems to work pretty well so far. I don’t often need phone maps in my daily life, just if I go on a road trip to an unfamiliar area. I have physical maps and a compass for when I go hiking or paddling, and will use GaiaGPS or CalTopo in the research phase of a trip. I also loaded Halfmile’s PCT maps into the Kompakt to see how legible they are, and hurrah! They’re quite usable. That’s a dream for another day!
Alarm and Calculator :
They work and they’re simple to use. If I need more advanced calculator functions, that’s why I have a laptop. The alarm is reliable, I haven’t had any missed/late alarms like one person reported. I like the alarm sounds, which include recordings of bells, dulcimer, guitar, the ocean, wildlife, and more. I haven’t tried adding any custom alarms or ringtones yet, so I can’t yet say whether this is possible.
Chess :
I am by no means a chess nerd but I like that it keeps a running record of all the moves so that I can learn chess better.
Recorder :
I like to use this to record lectures, and if I have a thought that I want to quickly capture, I can record myself to review later for entry into my journal. The recording quality is meant for basic voices, I wouldn’t try to record music or wildlife sounds with this.
Meditation :
I appreciate that this is considered an essential app to be included in Mudita’s lineup. I understand that I’m firmly in Mudita’s target market – I have been attending meditation groups for years. If anyone reading this is interested in learning meditation, I would recommend seeking out Tara Brach, Sharon Salzburg, Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Hugh Byrne, and of course, Thich Nhat Hanh.
Just one feature request for the app - more time customization (perhaps someone wants to use this as a timer or with the Pomodoro method).
Note that if you lock the screen, the timer stops, so if you don’t want the battery to drain while using this app, be sure to turn off the screen light.
Calendar :
I’m on my work laptop during the whole workday so I just use Outlook for work-related calendaring. All of my non-work-related calendaring is entered into my bullet journal. If I feel like I need a ping at a particular time to remind me “Hey this thing is starting soon”, I can just create an alarm on the phone for that time.
“Required” apps :
They’re not actually required. Your gym forces you to use an app? Quit the gym and go join a sports team. I guarantee you’ll have more fun. Dependent on Uber? Put a local taxi company on speed-dial. Your bank forces you to have an app? Switch to a bank that doesn’t. Tell them that’s why you’re switching. There’s a difference between a bank simply having an app vs the bank forcing you to use that app to be able to do basic functions. My bank lets me do everything on their website, using my laptop, and they have a phone number I can call if something comes up while I’m traveling. In the rare event I ever get a physical check I need to deposit, I can do it at a deposit-taking ATM. None of this requires an app.
If your home is full of smart devices that depend on an app to function, well, that’s a choice you made, you’re the one who bought those devices, so now you have to ask yourself if they’re really as indispensable as you think, and ask yourself why you’re even interested in the Kompakt in the first place. This isn’t a device that’s meant to please everyone. It’s designed for people who are looking for balance with technology, not people who are in thrall with it. It’s for people who read Cory Doctorow writing about enshittification and nod their heads in agreement.
Apps are designed to make you dependent on them, so that you feel like you can’t leave the platform. But the truth is, you can. I remember when I started using Evernote, I thought it was so great that I stopped using my bullet journal. But then Evernote succumbed to enshittification and forced a paid upgrade to be able to continue using features that had previously been free. It also messed up some syncs which lost a really important note I’d written. I felt burned. I looked for alternatives. I exported my Evernote notebook to Joplin, which now I mainly just use on my laptop. And I’ve started bullet journaling again. Take your power back from tech companies.
Multi-factor authentication :
You can use SMS but it’s not as secure. I’m looking into possibly getting a Yubikey and migrating my Microsoft Authenticator stuff to it, but I haven’t decided on that yet. For the time being I’m still using the old smartphone for authentication. It’s technically possible to install Authenticator with the Aurora store for the Kompakt, just haven’t done it yet.
Battery Life :
As someone who enjoys multi-day backpacking or kayaking trips, I am so grateful to find a phone that lasts multiple days. This used to be the norm, back before smartphones. Glad to have it back!
Life changes :
In an effort to be more mindful with technology and screen usage, I’m learning to do less “looking things up”. What I’ll do is every time I have that impulse, I’ll write it down in the Notes app “To look up later”. Then, later, when I open up my laptop, I review that note and decide what’s actually worth my time to look up. Often it’s a list of silly things that ultimately don’t really matter. “Who was that actress in that movie and what else has she done?” These are the kinds of information rabbit holes I’m trying to avoid.
I have been struggling with screen addiction more or less since the 1990s, starting with Usenet, IRC, and early computer games. I remember running SETI@home on my computer and just staring at the colorful representation of data analysis. Last year I caught myself staring at my smartphone’s home screen simply because it was colorful and beautiful, and that was the final straw, along with poor sleep caused by what I call my “late night research binges”, that I had to put my foot down and take drastic steps. I put a timer on the wifi so that it turns off at night to force myself to stop using the internet. And now, with the Kompakt, I can no longer spend idle minutes browsing the internet, as I did with my smartphone. I’m getting my life back. When I need a break from work, I am learning to close my eyes and actually rest, instead of picking up my phone. At the end of the day, I go for a walk and do my physical therapy exercises instead of scrolling for the latest memes. I came to the realization that scrolling taps into the same psychology as gambling, it’s your brain thinking “The next one will be a good one!” Entire books have been written about this so I won’t dwell on it further.
A quote from Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives . What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. … There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
From “The Writing Life”
From Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
There is a one line summary in the original post! Look right under the title.