A big-ish phone that I wanted to like

The Enter MindOne Pro it is pleasantly small.

I just call it a side phone, which is not correct; The screen is big, but the phone itself is a bit rectangular. The camera flips up for selfies – you can open it a little to use it as a stand or PopSocket version. There is Clicks keyboard extension which adds a magnetic ring and headphone jack. I tried my best to like it but I miss this phone no matter how you look at it.

I used it as a normal phone. I downloaded the minimalist launcher and tried using it as a dumb phone. I installed the keyboard box. I removed the keyboard case. Nothing feels right.

Me first encountered MindOne Pro at CES in January. It is made by Ikko, a company based in Shenzhen that has produced the most headphones and audio equipment to date. MindOne Pro is a small mobile phone, or an AI device, or… It ships worldwide and is priced at $499, although it is listed as $429 on the company’s website.

Despite the beauty of the hardware, I saw some yellow flags right off the bat when it overheated while installing it. The initial setup is always enough to get the phone’s processor to check, but the MindOne ran hotter that first day out of the box than most phones I’ve used. After a week it has settled down a bit, although it doesn’t take much to warm up again.

Battery life is also a concern. I saw it drop from the mid-90s to the 60s in an hour and a half, and I wasn’t doing anything taxing. Scrolling through reels, scrolling around on Google Maps, and downloading music – all over Wi-Fi – was enough to consume a third of the phone’s battery in less than two hours. It doesn’t feel right.

The bad news just keeps coming. The new camera design is a great idea, but the camera itself just stinks. Color correction is everywhere. It usually captures daylight well, but photos taken under low indoor lighting look too green.

The square footage of a mobile phone is great in theory – until you remember that a mobile screen is designed for vertical inches. The phone’s default behavior is to fill the entire screen, which means scrolling between vertical videos and pages. It’s not ideal and the on-screen keyboard fills more than half of the screen.

Fortunately, Ikko includes quick shade controls to ease this. There is an adjustment, which fits more on the screen, and a change to change the view to a dynamic one with black bars on the sides of the screen. It’s useful for those times when you enter picture boxes and select dates that don’t work on the big screen, even if it means you’re looking at a small display area inside an already small display.

Maybe that’s the point. I would recommend the MindOne if I see it as a low-end phone or just another phone for weekend use. I like the idea of ​​something like a Light phone that doesn’t run mind-numbing apps like Instagram that I can’t seem to get rid of. But sometimes you need the Uber app, so I have trouble with smaller phones that feel too small. MindOne can be an alternative – sure, you can open the Instagram app, but it’s too bad you’ll probably do less. Maybe I just don’t have the energy, but I found myself scrolling through Instagram quite often, other than having a bad time. The best minimalist phone is a mobile smartwatchetc.

I have a hard time accepting the keyboard. Again, it looks good in theory. There is a small battery inside and you can turn the switch to turn the phone off when you are using it. But somehow the keys are more complicated than just typing with an on-screen keyboard. I may have stopped doing it because I swear I was faster on my Blackberry Curve, but I found it slower and more cumbersome than the actual keys. The headphone jack is a thoughtful touch, though.

There is a whole other trigger on MindOne Pro dedicated to AI software that I’m not sure I understand. It has a chatbot that allows you to switch between LLMs, and a notes app. Ikko being a Chinese company, I wondered how it could answer questions that the Chinese government would not like. I asked if Hong Kong is part of China; it answered in Spanish for some reason and said it could not help me with my question. It comes with a universal eSIM that you can replace – it’s free to use with AI startups, but you’ll have to pay to use it for messaging and more. Connection is slow, especially in my neck of the woods in Seattle.

As beautiful as this concept is, I think that this phone will always have a hard time. Struggling to look at websites and apps that are made up of rectangles through a large window is a losing battle. Maybe instead of a square-ish phone what the world really needs is a smaller, rectangular phone with more modern bells and whistles. You hear that, phone makers? I urge every company to re-make the iPhone Mini with a USB-C port and battery it does not die in the middle of the day. MindOne is not that phone, especially for me. It’s probably for someone who’s easy on the battery and doesn’t choose a camera model. The rest of us will just keep watching.

Photo by Allison Johnson/The Verge