My phone is an ereader now

August 30, 2025

I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick it up again without arousing suspicion after the light had been turned out. I think I slowed my reading for fun as the work load of school increased, and stopped when moving every four months for internships in university. Having something small and portable that I could load books onto changed that and got my momentum going again. I now loosely grade how much I'm thriving by how much I'm reading, as an indirect indicator of how not burnt out I am.

It fared me quite well, but I had a few issues with it. Library books would randomly not work on it, even if they would show up on, for example, the Libby app on my phone. It also came with a way to sync articles to it via Pocket, but it always required a little too much forethought for me: I had to remember to find and save articles beforehand in order to then read them later. There were some services to do this automatically via RSS but the syncing process itself was just slow enough that I found myself rarely doing it. Also, Mozilla has now killed Pocket as a service. In the middle of writing this, they announced support for Instapaper instead, but it has the same workflow issues for me. My partner reads on her phone, but something about reading on a screen grates on me after a while, and makes it too easy to jump to something else.

So I was intrigued when I heard about the Minimal Phone, an Android phone with an epaper display. It wasn't the first epaper Android device I'd seen—I've seen reviews saying the Boox Palma is actually pretty great—but it was the idea of this being an actual phone that can take a sim card that really get me interested. What if I could read the news and blogs on what looks like paper while commuting, without having the forethought of downloading or syncing something? I might otherwise spend that time staring into space or looking at nothing on Bluesky. I'd probably rather be reading a bit of a book, or other longer-form writing. So I ordered one as a gift to myself.

The MP01

I figured I might be a good fit for this device. I don't really watch videos on my phone. I send messages a bit, but not urgently. Most of the time I'm at or near a full keyboard anyway. I take some photos, but not that many any more. I feel like the photo winds changed for me sometime in university and I now feel weird posting Nice Photos to social media. Who are those for, really? I now send quick photos directly to friends mostly, and they don't have to be print quality or anything. They just have to be visible.

With that in mind, I went in treating it like an experiment. I still have my Kobo that has its annoyances but works. I still have a fully functional Pixel 8 phone. I don't need this to work. At worst, this could just be an alternate ereader for me. So when it arrived mid-July, I started testing it full-time to see how it'd go, with my normal phone in my bag just in case.

Overall, I actually really like it! I absolutely would not recommend this device to everyone—I'll get into why later—but it's been working pretty well for me.

How the Minimal Phone works

This phone is around the same size of my Pixel 8. It's just a tad shorter and just a tad wider. I don't really feel the shortness, but I do feel the wideness a bit, which makes it more comfortable to read on. The bottom third of the height is taken up by a physical keyboard, and the top two thirds are an epaper display.

It's just Android under there, with a black-and-white epaper display. It comes with a few launchers, and I use one that works like a pretty traditional launcher, but comes with some built in icon choices that look sharp on the display.

There's a side button between the phone's volume keys that you can tap to flash the display to clear ghosting. I don't find myself doing this often—ghosting is not that bad—but if you press and hold it, it opens the display settings. This is something I do all the time.

The quick display settings screen, which you get to by pressing and holding the button between the volume keys.

From the settings screen, you can turn on and off the light on the display and on the keyboard, and also change the display light's colour temperature. I mostly leave those off; I only need those if I'm outside after dark, and the controls are big enough that I can turn them on easily enough in low light.

The most important setting is the refresh rate at the bottom. The slowest setting has the slowest refresh rate, but the highest quality visuals: always showing nice shades of grey, and with less ghosting but more flashing as it updates. The fastest setting (which, to be clear, is still not very fast) has much less flashing, a little more ghosting, and dithers pure black and white rather than showing any shades of grey. The middle setting, "hybrid" mode, is a combination of the two: it uses the faster setting while things are moving onscreen, and then updates to the slower, higher quality render when movement stops. I generally keep the phone in this hybrid mode, except for a few specific cases.

The keyboard feels pretty good, and it's a comfortable size to type on with two thumbs. I can't really one-handed type on this phone; it's a tad too wide for that, but the width is worth it for easier reading. I really appreciate them including the keyboard here, as the display looks great but is definitely not all that responsive, so typing would be a lot more frustrating without this.

The great parts

This thing is so nice to read on.

I hate reading on screens. Something about dark mode especially messes with my eyes, but even without that, I've never enjoyed reading articles on my phone. Too easy to get distracted, the minor eye strain... This device though, the epaper display looks great. It's not especially high resolution or anything, but I could spend a long time reading on this without issue. I just spent two flights (Toronto to Vancouver and back again) just reading books on this, and I'd do it again. It's really crisp and visible in the sun too.

A page of a book in the Libby app.

It's super easy to queue up library book holds and read them all from the phone. I have had zero issues with that. Being able to add new things on-the-go has also made it really easy to grab another book on the spot once I finish one. I definitely have found myself reading more books this past month and a half.

I also now am more likely to read people's blogs on an RSS reader than scroll through social media. I wasn't setting out to fully purge social media or anything, but I certainly feel a little more fulfilled after reading something that someone has clearly put time and effort into.

Possibly as a consequence of the display technology, I also generally get 2 days of usage out of a charge. Most days I finish with 70% battery remaining, letting me go another day with some buffer room. On some really low usage days, I could maybe even go more, but already this is great. On a high usage day, I'll maybe end with 50%, which is still fine by me.

This is secondary, by far, but I also feel now that I can fully turn off autocorrect, as this phone has a physical keyboard. Most of the time (with important caveats), I don't make typos. So I no longer have to suffer through autocorrect changing programming terms (which I still type a lot of), changing my capitalization, or doing its own insane capitalization (why would it format "city Hall" with just one capital? Commit to capitals or no capitals, don't do this awkward mix!)

An article on The Verge. Hey, it was the top post in the feed when I took the photo!

As another minor note, the fingerprint reader is actually quite fast. When it remembers my fingerprints, it's super reliable. ("What do you mean, when it remembers?" I'll get into it later, there's a pretty bad bug here. But in regular usage, it really does work well.)

Everything else this phone does, it does a little worse than a normal phone, but not so much worse that it's a problem. I assume it would be a lot worse at watching videos but I never really did that much on my old phone anyway. So on the whole, this phone works really well where I want it to, and generally gets out of my way for the usual stuff. I keep using it without really worrying about it.

The camera, once set up properly, is pretty passable. Well, the selfie camera is in a super awkward spot, but I don't really find myself using it anyway. But other photos look decent enough that I'm not embarrassed to send them to people!

My cat Pigeon looking out the window.

Toronto in the summer.

The selfie camera is a little sketchy, I wouldn't rely on it.

Phil Wizard breaking on Kits Beach in Vancouver.

Growing pains

Even though I do really like this thing, and am continuing to use it as my primary device, there are a lot of rough edges. This device is made by, primarily, two people (although they've been adding more developers in the past few weeks), so naturally there will be a lot of rough edges. You have to be willing to accept that if you're going to use this phone. They do make updates, but the pace is slow, and they are definitely bogged down by customer support and shipping/manufacturing logistics, so you need to not bank on fixes happening quickly.

There's a double-tap-to-wake feature that you can't turn off, and it takes a sec once locked to stop responding to inputs. Consequently, I now put this in my pocket with the display facing out, which is opposite of what I used to do, in order to prevent accidentally disturbing it in my pocket. Doing that, I haven't had issues, but it's an adjustment you have to make for this phone right now.

There are a few things you'll probably need to do to the device to make it work well for you. One of them involves the camera. By default, the camera super aggressively denoises its photos, resulting in images that look like they came off of my flip phone from 2008. However, if you use the Open Camera app, switch it to use the Camera 2 API, it then lets you turn off noise reduction in the settings. The resulting images look much crisper, and do have noise, but a tasteful—dare I say aesthetic?—amount of noise. There is no Pixel-style HDR in these photos, but now that that look is everywhere, the resulting photos are... kind of refreshing.

Taking a photo of fast a moving subject is quite hard on this thing due to the refresh rate of the screen. But then again, doesn't a photo like this capture the moment better? This is my aunt's cat Lexi.

The phone also uses something called Duraspeed to aggressively turn off background apps. This works well in general, but it also can stifle some notifications that you do want, and also can affect background audio. I know some people fully turn Duraspeed off, but I've just turned it off for my messaging apps and my music/podcast apps. I've had no notification or background process related issues since doing so.

I also found that the backlight was way too bright, and I didn't really want any lights on most of the time anyway. I found that when opening the display settings, it'd turn all the lights back on. But if I save a preset, then it'd stick. You can do that by changing the settings, and then pressing and holding on the wrench icon to save it to your custom preset.

Finally, the hybrid refresh mode needs things to stop moving in order to lock in on a higher quality render. That means animated ads are somehow even more annoying than they normally are. Thankfully, Firefox for Android lets you install addons, such as uBlock Origin, to deal with that.

Bugs

The most annoying bug is that this phone will occasionally restart and forget your fingerprint, forcing you to enter your PIN. I don't know why this happens. I can go for a few weeks with it working fine, and then it'll just forget. I can still get in with the PIN, so it's not locking me out, but there's really never a good time to re-set up a fingerprint, and typing a PIN on the onscreen display is slow and cumbersome. This is the bug I hope gets fixed the most.

Another bug has something to do with the screen refresh rate, and something to do with responding to keyboard input. If you're on a slower refresh rate and are typing quickly, sometimes it misses keypresses, and you have to go back and fix things. This is also quite annoying, but doesn't seem to happen on the highest screen refresh rate. As a workaround, when I'm sending messages, I switch to the fastest refresh setting. This one-or-the-other approach isn't great though (I still want photos sent to me in messaging apps to look nice!), so I'd love to see that improved over time.

I also have to use the phone in the lowest refresh rate for Google Maps in order to see the streets on the map. The color scheme is just too low contrast for the high refresh rate's dithering. The hybrid setting doesn't work either: your location on the map is always slightly moving and so it never locks in and renders a higher-quality image. Arguably, this is a problem with Google Maps because they don't have a high contrast mode. Surely that would have accessibility benefits beyond just this weird device!

Google Maps when in hybrid or fast mode. Where did the streets go??

There's a software update that the Minimal team has been working on for almost two months that will apparently address the fingerprint forgetting issue, make double-tap-to-wake optional, significantly increase the refresh rate on the fast refresh mode, and let you save per-app refresh rate settings. That'll address some of my problems for sure! But it also hasn't shipped yet. To use this device is an exercise in patience, and being accepting of imperfections.

Feature Requests

None of these are dealbreakers for me, but here's what I'm hoping to see in the future:

Concluding the experiment

It's been more than a month, and despite not everything being perfect, I'm going to continue using this phone. I do occasionally switch to my Pixel 8 though. I use my Pixel 8 for running for its better waterproofing. When I needed to get actual good, postable photos from SIGGRAPH two weeks ago, I just used my Pixel 8. When seeing LCD Soundsystem last weekend, rather than worry about weirdness with the Ticketmaster app, I just took my Pixel 8. But I've used normal boarding passes for airplanes on my MP01, and I regularly go out without a backup phone. I do mostly rely on my partner to do Google Maps navigation since that's a little bit smoother, although in a pinch I can still use it myself (and the Transit app is a little better in hybrid mode.)

Basically, I use the right tool for the job, and this phone doesn't have to be that tool for all jobs. But it turns out I don't need my phone to do all that many jobs, and it's maybe a good thing for it to be doing less of them.

There are enough quirks that I wouldn't automatically recommend this experience. But if you know what you're getting into and have the right expectations, this is a really great little device!