Minimal Phone

The Minimal Phone is an Android smartphone built around a 4.3-inch black-and-white E Ink display instead of an LCD. It runs a near-stock Android 14 with the full Google Play Store behind a text-list launcher, and types on a 35-key physical QWERTY keyboard 74mm wide. The E Ink panel is 600x800 at 230ppi, and the company quotes roughly four days of battery. It keeps a headphone jack, NFC payments, Android Auto, and RCS messaging, and ships with five years of software updates and a one-year warranty. The Onyx and Pebble finishes come with 6GB of memory and 128GB of storage; Fusion is 8GB and 256GB.

Paul Gu set one up for his five-year-old with nothing on it but a texting app. The phone gives her a real reason to started working on her letters to communicate with her family. The physical keyboard brings me back to my BlackBerry days but it also pushes the kid to spell words out rather than tapping on suggestions.