My thoughts on Mudita Pure

Here are some thoughts on my first 2 weeks with Mudita Pure
I am switching from a smartphone and I think this was a really bad idea. I should have prepared myself for this experience by using a dumb phone. Or maybe dumbed-down my smartphone. This phone takes a lot of getting used to. I guess my brain is still wired for a smartphone. That’s why I took some time to play around with it before I posted a review because I didn’t think I would be fair in my review if I wrote it while constantly frustrated. I still find myself taking the phone out when I’m idle in order to scroll, only to be disappointed.
PROS:
Solid construction. It’s not flimsy. I guess it’s made of some type of plastic, but doesn’t really feel cheap. It feels really solid. It’s a bit bigger than I expected, but after a week, I see the point of it. If it was any smaller, I would be annoyed.
Calls come through fine. Music is pretty loud on the speaker & even louder on headphones.
I have no issues with the keyboard, so I guess that was fixed fine.
Battery is decent, about a week when I use it.
Tethering is a plus. It makes going online very purposeful. It works well. I’ve had no problems so far.
Being able to send messages via Mudita Center is a plus. It works like Whatsapp web, but for text messages. You can see full color emojis. This really helps since there is no T9- more on that later.
I really like uploading music and podcasts to the phone, but there are some issues- more on that below in the CONS.
CONS:
The lack of T9 or any other predictive texting is irritating. This makes me want to call more & text less. Like I said, I’m coming off a smartphone and anything that involves any extra effort right now is bothersome.
Call quality is OK. To be more specific: I hear people just fine, but I have been told that I come through not very clear. Several times I have been asked to speak up.
Not all functions work the way they should. The calendar is just a calendar. You cannot upload events in it.
Merging contacts is a bit complicated. I uploaded contacts via Mudita Center and then when there was a software update, they don’t show up in Mudita Center, but they do show up in my phone. If I add a contact via the phone, it does not show up in Mudita Center.
I cannot change ringtones. The ones that are there are OK. I think I would like to add my own to personalize my phone.
I don’t think all the functions are working in Mudita Center. I can upload music, but not through the app. I have to do it like a normal external drive. It pops up on my laptop, just like a thumb drive would. I wish that was mentioned before. It seems like I had to figure out all the things that are not functioning on my own. That is not good.
I would like to know when I should expect software updates and what will be corrected each time.
Overall, I like the phone, it works, but the features that are supposed to be “extra” are not really there yet. I hope they are fixed soon.

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I really appreciate your thoughts. I have to say, I’m growing mildly concerned with these ‘call quality’ issues I’ve now read in a couple of reviews (as a phone - and especially a “minimal” one - calls should work absolutrely perfectly IMHO), and more broadly with other issues yourself and others have described, plus the ongoing shipping delays with lack of clarity around delivery times.

Having left traditional social media this month, and switched to an old Blackberry of mine (working great as a simple phone currently), I’m well-invested in ‘returning to simpler times’, but I have to say I am currently weighing up whether to cancel my Mudita Pure order altogether.

ps. a couple more reviews from Pure users can be found:
here: Reviews of Mudita Pure (sandra)
and here: Reviews of Mudita Pure (joel)

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@Jasraj_Hothi I’m a Blackberry user as well. Quick question- have you experienced any service disruption after Jan 4th?

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Good question! So I’m on a Blackberry Classic, and texts and calls appear to be working just fine for me. Maps, on the other hand, seems to longer be working which is a shame (I’m guessing with their announcement about services stopping as of Jan 2021]. I don’t really use it for anything else, but I’m guessing others apps/services are also now defunct.

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Thanks for the review. What carrier and country are you on?

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I am currently in Germany, but originally from India. I use Vodafone, but recently traveled around the EU & the service is fine.

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How’s autocompletion suggestions when typing? Contextual predictive requires data and third party more than likely. No reason we can’t have dictionary suggested autocomplete.

Voice quality could be easily sound profile issues. Will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Taking out my phone when I am bored and feeling disappointment to me is a feature. That means I should go do something else and probably with someone instead or just simply be present. It’s already like this for me on my smartphone as I have gotten rid of almost everything.

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@parmin Thank you for posting this. Is the call quality problematic? Does it happen all the time or just some of the time?

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Hi,
I’d like to thank you for the review. It is even more valuable as you’re in the process of the smartphone detox.
We would like to let you know that we really appreciate that you liked your Pure - it means a lot to us.

Let me address some of the cons:

The lack of T9 or any other predictive texting is irritating. This makes me want to call more & text less. Like I said, I’m coming off a smartphone and anything that involves any extra effort right now is bothersome.

The predictive writing is in the research stage, so surely it WILL be implemented in future releases - we know that a lot of you are waiting for this feature, but patience is the key.

Call quality is OK. To be more specific: I hear people just fine, but I have been told that I come through not very clear. Several times I have been asked to speak up.

I’m glad that you liked the quality of the calls. I’ll give you a little teaser - we’ve been working on upgrading the quality of the calls and we find out a way to tweak it a little bit, so it should be even better than now.

Not all functions work the way they should. The calendar is just a calendar. You cannot upload events in it.

Yep, that’s true. But let me explain - a full-blown calendar is planned to be done, so you don’t have to worry about the missing features. We just need some time as the development unfortunately takes some time and I think that you would agree, that a simple calendar is better than nothing :slight_smile:

Merging contacts is a bit complicated. I uploaded contacts via Mudita Center and then when there was a software update, they don’t show up in Mudita Center, but they do show up in my phone. If I add a contact via the phone, it does not show up in Mudita Center.
I cannot change ringtones. The ones that are there are OK. I think I would like to add my own to personalize my phone.
I don’t think all the functions are working in Mudita Center. I can upload music, but not through the app. I have to do it like a normal external drive. It pops up on my laptop, just like a thumb drive would. I wish that was mentioned before. It seems like I had to figure out all the things that are not functioning on my own. That is not good.

I’ll pass this to the Mudita Center team!

I would like to know when I should expect software updates and what will be corrected each time.

I believe that with the next firmware releases the changelog will be included, so you could take a look at what was changed.

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I am finding in Mudita centre I cannot send messages longer than 144 characters, which is really hindering my use of the phone, has anyone else found this?

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Correct. Not possible to send longer texts.

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That may just be the limitation of SMS.

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Yes. And lack of MMS.

I’ve got some GREAT news about the lengths of texts in Mudita Center- Although the characters are limited now, our tech team has informed me that that’s only a temporary issue. They are working on implementing a solution which would make it possible to send longer text messages. Hopefully this helps.

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I always thought that the main twelve keys (numbers) were fine, but the four-way directions and their center button is what’s bad.

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