Punkt rocks its minimalist roots with first smartphone | TechCrunch
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Minimalist phonemaker Punkt has launched its first smartphone, positioned at the crossroads between minimalism, privacy, and utility.
  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    573·
    9 months ago

    $749

    They must have a different understanding of minimalism than I do, lol.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Now I’m imagining a phone with a push-button blade at the side of it. 🙃

  • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
    121·
    9 months ago

    I don’t get the use case. What does it offer over getting an old phone and sticking LineageOS on it?

    • guyrocket@kbin.social
      12·
      9 months ago

      Or any pixel and putting grapheneos on it.

      I think the advantage is that you get to pay $20/mo for some software after the 1st year.

      Wtf.

      • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        Right. Like, why would anyone pay a subscription for that?

        Edit: I think I get it now:

        Those who buy the MC02 get a year for free, after which they’ll pay around $20/€15/£13 each month (discounted if paid annually) to access a handful of services, including email, a VPN (dubbed “Digital Nomad”), online synchronization for calendar and contacts, secure storage on Punkt’s own Swiss servers and the express promise that there will be no ads or third-party crawlers.

        So you can access cloud services without being tied to Google, I suppose. Still, the value proposition is questionable.

      • PoorPocketsMcNewHold@lemmy.mlEnglish
        21·
        9 months ago

        And even that advantage can be minimized by getting any bundle of privacy products, like Proton which offer all of those (Mail, VPN, Drive, Calendar) or even with your self-hosted VPS (Some VPS seller even allow you to prepare it with Nextcloud and a VPN relay for near no extra paiement).

        I see the “pay once to one company”, but you also need to trust them entirely, for EVERYTHING.

        Also, there’s already plenty of companies doing such thing (regardless of how practical/private/secure they are)

        • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          /e/OS is extremely insecure.

          Iodé is just LineageOS which is also not better

          Purism (librem) is a scam company not delivering any phones to paying customers, while pretending to do well.

          GrapheneOS is the only one that makes sense, and they use it as Base, so if you for some reason dont want GrapheneOS this may be the next best thing

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      72·
      9 months ago

      You can brag about how you didn’t pay as much as an iPhone while still being able to lord it over the plebs that your phone was expensive.

        • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          Can you look at the phone and honestly tell me it’s not kinda douchey?

          • wrath_of_grunge@kbin.social
            2·
            9 months ago

            personally, i’ve got more important shit going on that what phone people are using. in the case of this phone, it looks like any other number of Android phones with a custom theme.

            i’m assuming it’s more than that, but it still looks a bit silly. you can be minimalist and still appreciate things like color.

    • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Might be more secure since it’s based on GrapheneOS.

      If they didn’t mess anything up (security and privacy wise) in their deriviative OS, then I would feel comfortable recommending this to non-tech savvy people who care about their privacy.

      Edit: Also with those specs and that battery without Google Play Services, this phone might last me a week on a single charge.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      It is based on GrapheneOS which is exactly what the project wants.

      GrapheneOS is permissively licensed which means exactly this is possible and wanted. I dont get it, but I guess its realism.

      Their hardware is way less secure though, so I will stick with user Pixels and GrapheneOS.

  • lea@feddit.deEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    Those specs are just horrendous, why would they put an LCD when they got that pure black theme going on?

  • terry_tibbs@lemmy.mlEnglish
    102·
    9 months ago

    One of the screenshots has google play store installed on it, that’ll do wonders for privacy.

    • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      According to the article, it is installed in a “sandbox”. As their OS is based on GrapheneOS, I assume they’re using the same solution.

  • Honzai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    I always get hopeful when I see minimalist because I’m hoping for the return of smaller phones. I wish I was smart enough to recreate the feel rested of the nexus 5x with modern hardware. Without the issues the original had ofc.

  • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Aaah that Apostrophy OS thing.

    Sooo: their phone is way less secure than a Google Pixel, their OS is paid but possibly less secure than GrapheneOS as they need to remove features like Memory Tagging that is only available on Pixels.

    Hell I dont even know if they have a secure element.

    Until we get Sourcecode I wouldnt trust them.