Figured I’d give my two cents on this wonderful product that I’ve been using as my only phone for the last few weeks since receiving it.
If you just want the quick answer: i’d say you should try out the phone at least. It’s an incredible product and I genuinely do love it.
Now to make things a bit more interesting, I want to try and approach this “review” from a perspective of someone who is very far from the “customer avatar” Mudita as a company is targeting and someone who doesn’t feel feel any real attachment to it.
In other words, I am not a minimalist or some barefoot hippie. I am not into meditation or mindfulness or zen or spirituality, digital detoxes, etc. I find the rest of the Mudita products a classic and annoying case of “Premium Mediocre.” And I don’t have any social media addiction problems, or anything of the sort.
The primary reason I bought this phone is to simply try something new. All my life I was on Apple and wanted to rock the boat a bit. Now the secondary reason for the purchase is to support something EU-made from the tech industry. It needs all the boosts it can get these days I feel like.
Onwards to the review…
What works great:
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Phone & SMS: Whether inside our outside, it works great. The calls sound crisp and they’re loud enough. The speaker is loud and clear enough too. The SMS allow me to send photos without a problem and so far everyone is receiving them as they should.
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Display: this one i just don’t get the fuss about. I see a lot of developers whining about how pixelated it is. I really don’t give a damn. I think it’s a great display and it refreshes quickly enough for my taste, and I don’t feel the need to change anything about it.
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Hotspot: I’ll just copy and paste what I wrote in another post, overall it works great! Hotspot support was one of the most important aspects of the Mudita Kompakt for me since I always used internet tethering of some sort and never had a home wifi for work or pleasure. For those interested, I must admit, it thankfully works very well — even on more taxing tasks:
- Had a zoom video call with a client for a whole hour - no lag or disconnects, works great
- Had a google meet video call with a friend - no lag or disconnects, works great, too
- Uploaded a ton of short and long form content on youtube - slow, but it hasn’t been any better when i was using my iphone 12 mini as a hotspot honestly, so that’s a plus still in my book
- Internet browsing, doing coding and website design, talking to AI, all while listening to youtube videos and streams in the background all works great — no problems whatsoever.
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Camera: i love that there is no app for the gallery. Keeps things simple. And the camera does a good job of being a basic point and shoot. So far, I haven’t had any problems with it. Although I do admit, I rarely take photos of anything. I also don’t mind if there isn’t any option of recording videos. I can totally see how great that would be for some, but me personally — i don’t mind.
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Recorder: works great and sounds decent (not superb by any means, but passable). I do a lot of recording when brainstorming different stuff.
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Control center: love that there is one in general. And putting weather and settings in there among the other controls is a very smart move. Again, keeps things simple. And I like simple.
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Notes: I take a lot of them and they look and feel great. Would still like to have an option to write notes on my mac in the Mudita center and then transfer them to the phone, but what we have now is totally fine, too. Hack: write a note on your computer, send it to yourself via Whatsapp on the phone, copy it, then paste it into the native notes app. Works great.
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Sideloading: easy as hell to setup. The apps I have side loaded are Whatsapp, Signal, Waze, Claude AI, and AntennaPod. For the most part, the apps look good. And all seem to be working fine, with zero crashes.
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Battery: I am getting 2-4 days battery life, which is great. Note: the only times when the phone lasts only a day is when I am using hotspot a lot, which burns through battery quickly - but such drainage is normal compared to my old iPhone mini).
What I have mixed feelings about
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E-reader: good reading experience. But I would like to see things like highlights, a built-in dictionary and darkmode for that specific app.
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Sounds problems: for some reason, my notification sound occasionally turns off, so that’s frustrating. And then I have to go into the sound settings and play with the slider for a few seconds to get it to turn on again. Looks like a glitch but it may just be me doing something wrong.
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Lock-screen (the one that comes after the logo but before you actually unlock the phone): good looking, although it would be cool to have a flashlight button on it for easy access.
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Mudita center: a bit glitchy. My contacts are all duplicated when I browse them there, even though there’s no such problem on the actual phone. And it’s a pain in the butt to still be unable to import audios on the Kompakt (but I guess that’s just a mac problem).
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Case and screen protector: it bugs me a tiny bit that the screen protector isn’t edge to edge and that the case is relatively thick and makes the phone far “fatter” than it actually is. Good quality case though.
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Group messaging: not a must for me personally, but it would be cool if we’d get it eventually.
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Shooting photos directly from the SMS app then sending them: self-explanatory. Not a dealbreaker, but would be cool to have this option.
What seems to really be missing:
- Maps: turn-by turn navigation and opening/closing hours.
- Music: ability to sort songs by artist, album, create folders and/or playlists.
- Calendar: recurring events are sorely missing.
- QR codes: none register via the camera. Maybe I am missing something.
- Timer & Stopwatch: can’t believe this isn’t on the phone by default. And no, the meditation app doesn’t count.
Edit: as it pertains to QR codes, @nilstzh pointed out, “Camera doesn’t read QR codes. But sideloaded apps do (e.g. whatsapp for login, or generic qr reader if you install one)” Thank you for the heads-up!
