Talking about Light Phone 3 and Mudita Kompakt while having seen neither device, and also some talk about InkPalm Plus, Nokia 8210, iPad Pro, and the old Mudita Pure, all of which I’ve used extensively.
The Mudita Kompakt is shipping April 2025.
I like that it can read epubs and I like the offline button.
The one thing it’s really missing is a hotspot feature! The original Pure made a big deal of how it had a wired equivalent of a hotspot, letting you do email on a computer in a focused way then unplug it when you were on the go. You work through your emails with a real keyboard at a real work station, and don’t get sucked into jankily thumbing at them on the train when you could be reading. That was a great idea… that didn’t work with iPad, only with laptops. Having a hotspot feature would be a way to realize that dream. Maybe there is a hotspot feature, it’s just not clear from the Kickstarter campaign.
I preordered Light Phone 3 which (if everything stays on track) is shipping January. My current Nokia dumbphone is a mess that keeps crashing—today was especially rough as I was dealing with a family emergency and my Nokia phone kept crashing so hard that I had to take out the battery to restart it, so January can’t come soon enough.
And (please please please don’t boo me too much, I’m already regretting it so much) I got an InkPalm Plus too, as a “companion device”. It sucks—the battery life on the InkPalm is really really bad (and this is a brand new device… And the battery is not replaceable so this InkPalm is a living piece of e-waste) and Delta Chat crashes so my only hope for doing email from it is ConnectBot. It’s actually really really good at reading books, but I had Simon’s decade-old used Kindle to do that. While the InkPalm is much much better at it, I didn’t need “better” when I already had “good enough”. I use the InkPalm currently to listen to podcasts but the LP3 will handle podcasts when it comes.
If-and-only-if there is a hotspot feature on the Kompakt (and it otherwise delivers on its promises), that makes me really kick myself for going with the LP3+InkPalm combo. Because this seems like both-in-one in a good way. The dimensions of the Kompakt, 128 x 70 x 12.6 mm, are really great for me. (That’s also why I don’t have Fairphone, the new ones are way too big.)
I still have my Mudita Pure (I helped work on it♥︎) in a drawer here. I love the shape of it but the build quality (button feel, slider quality etc) was not good and I had lots of dropped calls and audio issues. It’s one of my few phones that never broke—I keep it “as a spare”—but it’s just too janky to use. But there’s nothing to say that the Mudita Kompakt will make the same mistakes. They might and they mightn’t, but I’d be willing to risk getting “fooled again”, betting that they learned from the Pure. We’ll see. 💁🏻♀️
Camera: while the Kompakt’s 8MP camera is nothing compared to LP3’s 50 MP camera, it’s way better than my Nokia 8210s crappy 0.3 MP camera and even the 2DS’ 0.5 MP camera, although they’re worse than my iPad’s 12 MP. And I’m fine with the photos being in eink on-device, they’ll be in color when moved to another device.
Now to the second best part (after reading ebooks):
can, before you leave,Unlike the Light Phone, but like the InkPalm, you can sideload some APKs onto the Mudita Kompakt. It requires ADB and a separate computer. Hacking an LP2, and most likely LP3, you can jump out into Android itself and run other apps that way, but what sucks is they don’t show up in the LP3 UI and app list, but they do on InkPalm and Kompakt, which is great.
So you can put AntennaPod and ConnectBot on there. The InkPalm doesn’t even require any ADB hoops, you can just download F-Droid from the device itself.
Now, because there are no Google services, there are many apps that just don’t work even if they’re in Aurora, and because of e-ink being e-ink, even some F-Droid apps (like TextFiction) don’t work, but some do work really well.
There’s an upside to having to do ADB hoops to install apps: you can keep apps like email and web firmly uninstalled for your day-to-day life when you, at some point during your normal week, will have access to a computer and focused email time, and then when you’re about go on a longer trip away from your computer, that’s when you can connect the phone to ADB and put those apps on there. Then those apps become like a foldable travel toothbrush: way too janky for home use but wonderful for a light and small bag. Emailing on phone might be janky, but if that means not having to bring the entire computer, it can make for a lighter packed bag and an easier journey. Sometimes just being able to do something at all can be be enough.
Conclusion:
Actually pondering if I can some how wriggle out of the LP3 preorder (and just chalk the InkPalm up as a mistake) and switch to the Kompakt. One factor in my self-kicking regret will be how well the sideloading situation is on LP3. LP3 has six gigs of RAM while the InkPalm has two, which might be why Delta Chat is crashing. (Even though having two entire gigabytes is mindblowing to me as a Xennial.)
While I like the ability to just bring the LP3 and leave the InkPalm at home, the Kompakt is small enough.
Now the fact that I have a tablet instead of a laptop (since I hate laptops) makes the InkPalm an even more stupid and redundant part of my combo setup and an even bigger mistake. I should just have bought a bigger bag 🤦🏻♀️. But there is something about the iPad (maybe the screen?) that makes me fatigued and addicted—I can’t put it down. I need it if I want to do computer work, like programming (everything I’ve posted the three years whether writings, images, or code, I’ve done on it), but I always feel much better when I’ve been away for it for a few weeks or even a few days.
Going on a trip away from home but bringing the iPad would be pointless because it wouldn’t be getting away from anything. The destination would have to be killer, like visiting loved ones always is 🥰 (iPad or no iPad), but when traveling without bringing the iPad, even just going to a café or a random subway station or neighboring city feels awesome and liberating.
I get hypnotized by the screen somehow, I dunno. That sounds like woo; I don’t know what’s going on, it just is this way and an Android tablet had the same problem, when inheriting grandma’s Android tablet ended my dumbphone experience in 2020. My new apartment is too small for a desktop.
I thought one pro about the “combo setup” would’ve been to use the companion device for podcasts on long, multi-hour train trips to make sure I don’t eat up the battery of the phone I need to call my host when I arrive to their city, but since the battery life of InkPalm is so weak, that plan is pretty flawed.
I have since heard about the Unihertz Jelly Star. So that means that there are three phones, either of which might be a good fit for me. I’ve decided to stick with the Light Phone III. It has been delayed to shipping in March which probably means an April or May arrival for me here in Sweden. I’m really looking forward to having some of the smart phone conveniences available again.
And I still regret getting that InkPalm Plus. It’s so clunky as a work tool. It works well as an entertainment device, but I already had plenty of those.
I’m going to try to cancel my preorder. Not to get a Jelly Star or a Kompakt either. I don’t know what I’ll do. The new ad from Light Phone, and the reaction from the existing fan base, made it clear that trusting the privacy story for any of these phones is a huge ask. Without auditable FOSS code and signed builds what do we even have?
Here is a rando blogger pointing out how digital minimalism and privacy is not the same.
And I knew that. And I was more into unplugging than cypherpunk bonafides so that’s why these three phones were on my radar. But seeing the so-called community (on Reddit) bite the heads off of anyone who brings up the very real privacy asks here after the ad makes inexplicable claims really reminds me that maybe it is something I do care about.
And, I’m already in a situation where my entire setup is compromised as heck. I am typing this on a Debian machine, sure—but SSH’d from an iPad. Apple could be keyloggin every password for all I know. That goes for Xiaomi’s InkPalm too. If I really want to start caring about this again I’d have a lot of work ahead of me. But that’s no excuse for piling more straws onto that camel back.
I thought these guys were clueless about infosec, but that they were “good guys” who would “probably” not do anything bad, and that text messages and contact lists were inherently insecure anyway. I still kind of think or hope that’s the case. But don’t then make an ad trying to say that infosec is an USP with your phone.
MMS texts or even any texts with links are sent via their cloud (so they can be emailed to you for some reason…?!), even voice-to-text input does, and so do direction queries. And putting music files on this thing, that goes over their cloud too, right? Pretty much everything does. Even your contacts list apparently. “No, don’t worry, we don’t do anything with it.”
I canceled the Light Phone preorder. I’m sad about it because it still feels like least bad in many ways. But not good enough. None of the ones that exist are good enough. I hate iPad and InkPalm too, and Linode/Akamai. Everything is bad, everything feels gross and untrustworthy.