Minimal

Minimal
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Do you spend a large portion of your day using your phone?  Are you checking social media more than once or twice a day?  Do you have more than one or two games on your phone?  To put it simply, are you addicted to your phone?  It seems that a Harmony Healthcare (pvt) survey that was carried out at the end of last year (1,001 respondents) indicates that Americans have actually increased the amount of time they spend on their phones by 14.1% y/y, although intentions are good with the number of Americans who want to cut down on phone usage also rising to 53% in the latest survey.  Most feel that cutting down on screen time will improve their time management and their mental health, while improving their sleep time.  However, with 49% of respondents admitting that they are addicted to their phones, cutting the cord is not an easy task.

Figure 1 - Daily Smartphone Usage Time - 2024/2023 - US - Source: SCMR LLC, Harmony Healthcare

There is a category of phones that few know about.  They are called minimalist phones, with the object to reduce the technology overload that regular smartphones encourage while still providing the necessary essentials.  The category’s advertising might be a bit over the top, citing minimalist phones as ‘calming’ or ‘mindful’, but the idea is to increase the user’s productivity by eliminating notifications and other distractions.  The most recent entry into the category is from The Minimal Company (pvt), a small Santa Monica company founded on the idea that technology should enhance, not detract from our lives, and products should support well-being, encourage real-world connections, and promote productivity (Their words),  At the same time, the company’s first phone entry  does have some interesting features.
Most minimalist phones run on proprietary operating systems, usually designed to isolate the user from the typical advertising, mindless applications, and the constant barrage of notifications that typical smartphones provide.  The Minimal phone however, operates on Android 14, which allows the user to download applications that they are used to using, but without the multitude of distractions.  The phone is also the only one we know that uses an E-ink (8069.TT) display.  The 4.3” display is black and white, and only draws power when the information is changing.  This allows the 3,000 mAh battery to last ‘days’ rather than hours.  But It is not made to watch videos or play games.  Like many e-readers, it allows the user to comfortably read text.  The phone has two cameras (16Mp & 5Mp and can shoot 2K video at 30 fps, but it is not designed to be your primary device for shooting your “History of Italian Architecture” documentary.
The phone has a Mediatek (2454.TT) processor, albeit one that was released in 2022, with a Mediatek AI processor, 6 or 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM and either 128GB or 256 GB of storage, along with all of the usual sensors and connectors.  It is not 5G enabled, but it has a QWERTY keyboard, similar to those in BlackBerry (BB) phones, and sells for a very minimalistic $399, pointing it toward the mid-to-low end of the phone pricing spectrum, although it has many of the features of more expensive phones.

​We are certainly not encouraging folks to toss their iPhones and pick up a Minimal, and we don’t expect that our highly smartphone addicted culture will be able to kick the habit and become a minimalist society, but it is interesting to see a different focus from the ‘jam everything possible into the phone’ philosophy that is the smartphone business,  It represents a return to a simpler way of life, perhaps not quite like when kids were able to ride their bicycles around the neighborhood until dinner time, without their parents following them in the family SUV.  Sometimes we miss that…