Minimal Phone Review (2025)

The Minimal Phone is a smartphone that runs a full version of Android on an E-Paper display. It has a 35-button keyboard that appeals to a wide range of users, including those looking to reduce smartphone addiction and regain focus. It can also be used as a portable e-book reader.

Minimal Phone Review (2025)

The Minimal Look

The Minimal phone is a slap-style phone. However, unlike modern slap-style phones, this one is a bit wider because you have to hold it with both hands.

The reason for this is the physical keyboard built into the phone body. The QWERTY keyboard layout stretches from end to end, with a long space bar separating the symbol and emoji buttons, giving you a total of 35 keys.

I found the keyboard to work quite well. It has a satisfyingly tactile click to it. The symbols are easy to read, and I prefer the square buttons over the round ones.

Design

The Minimal phone is, in a nutshell, an E-Paper, Android-based BlackBerry. On the front of the phone is a 4.3-inch display and a physical keyboard with 35 keys.

Between the two screens are three old-school capacitive buttons for returning to the home screen, going back to the previous screen, and opening recent apps.

The phone has all the ports and buttons you would expect from a phone released a few years ago, including a microSD card slot and a headphone jack. On the right side is the power button, which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner.

On the left side are two volume buttons, an e-paper refresh button between them, and a SIM card tray with a microSD card slot.

On the bottom is the aforementioned 3.5mm headphone jack, along with a USB-C port, microphone, and speaker. There’s a 5MP front-facing camera and a 16MP rear-facing camera with flash.

Despite the name and small display, this phone doesn’t look all that different from modern phones. It measures 5.59 inches tall and 8.6mm thick, thanks to the physical keys that fill the area below the screen.

What stands out most to me is the width. At 3.07 inches (about 7.6cm), it’s the widest foldable I’ve ever handled. For comparison, the Pixel 9 is 9mm taller, 0.1mm thinner, and 7mm thinner.

Physical keys

I can overlook these dimensions because of the keyboard. My first phone was a Verizon Alias feature phone, my first smartphone was a Kyocera Milano, and then a Kyocera Rise. All three phones feature physical keyboards.

The nostalgia I felt when I first heard the Minimal Phone was immediate and intense. There’s something viscerally satisfying about typing on physical buttons.

But honestly, I still find myself typing faster on a touchscreen. Over time, as my fingers get used to it over the next few months, that may change.

For the time being, I think I’ll be able to type faster on the narrower cover display of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6. It’s just not comparable on the larger internal screen of the phone I’m more comfortable with.

Much of the problem lies in the alternate character layout. It’s tedious to end a sentence with a period and then capitalize the first letter of the next sentence.

This could be fixed with a software update, but for now, it’s the most frustrating issue I’ve had, and it’s why I use voice dictation more often than the Samsung keyboard.

Likewise, selecting characters that aren’t on any physical keys is particularly frustrating because you have to switch to the touchscreen.

The same goes for e-paper displays. E-paper makes digital screens look like real ones. This technology is typically reserved for e-readers like the Kindle and various Kobo devices.

Companies like Boox are taking full advantage of the technology, releasing note-taking tablets and full-featured e-paper Android tablets.

The company markets the Boox Tab Ultra C Pro as a full-fledged e-paper PC, while the tiny Boox Palma 2 e-reader is essentially a smartphone, minus the smartphone features.

Despite its color e-paper display, the Minimal Phone’s display is black and white. While it can display all Android apps, it’s not always readable.

The subtle differences in app design are lost, and subtle gradients appear only in white. While modern LCD and OLED panels offer developers millions of colors, e-paper displays can only display a limited number of shades of gray.

The refresh rate can be a bit tricky to adjust. Almost any modern budget phone will feel faster than the Minimal Phone. Not because of the specs, but because of the limitations of e-paper.

To compensate for this, you can adjust the screen refresh rate a bit. The phone basically runs on a slow setting, which keeps the screen looking its best, but there is a significant amount of lag.

The higher refresh rate makes it feel more like an LCD panel, but also causes more ghosting (where you still see part of the previous screen when you open a new screen). That’s why there is a physical e-book refresh button between the volume keys, which makes the screen look sharper.

However, if you’ve ever used an e-book reader, you know that there is nothing better for reading e-books than an e-book. If you’re a bookworm, this alone is enough to justify buying this phone.

Camera

The Minimal Phone has a 16MP rear camera and a 5MP selfie camera. The viewfinder is a high-resolution black-and-white E-Ink display, making it hard to see what you’re looking at and framing the shot, making it very difficult to take pictures with the camera.

It’s like looking at a black-and-white impressionist painting. The phone itself takes color pictures, but you’ll need to sync them to a laptop or cloud service to see what they actually look like.

Even when exporting pictures, they’re mediocre at best and lack detail. Even in bright sunlight, it’s hard to see individual branches on a tree.

Taking selfies like the one in my cat photo below is even harder because of the awkward position of the camera. The field of view is often limited unless you hold the phone upside down.

While minimal phones can record video, the results are disappointing and editing is virtually impossible. If you’re even remotely interested in taking photos or videos on your phone, I recommend the Pixel 9a for its excellent photo and video capabilities.

Software

This phone runs Android 14 and gives you full access to the Play Store, which sets it apart from most other high-end phones. You can install the apps you want.

Thanks to the e-paper display, you probably won’t want to use most of them. You can log into video platforms and download games, but neither will be satisfying. TikTok and Instagram will be much less appealing.

The beauty of this phone is that it still has all the modern-day expectations. You can scan QR codes in public places, continue to use two-step authentication apps, and continue to do mobile banking.

When someone sends you a photo or wants to video chat, you can join without having to explain that you have a unique phone. Since Minimal Company is still a young, small team, it’s unclear whether customers will receive consistent software updates over time.

It was already outdated when it launched. Android 15 has been available since last fall. Android phones are often slow to update, but will Minimal Phone customers still be on Android 14 when Android 16 comes out? Will they support Android 17? That’s something to keep in mind when buying an experimental phone like this. On the other hand, if everyone decides to wait and see, the answer is definitely no.

Battery life

Minimal phones boast amazing battery life. If you use them as little as possible, which is what they are designed to do, you can expect to get a battery life of several days. Since our phones are so ubiquitous, we’ve started to think of battery life as something that can last most of a week rather than most of a day.

On the other hand, when we used our phones a lot, the battery life was somewhat faster. The phones have physical keyboards that encourage typing, but each time you type a letter, the phone drains more power. However, it doesn’t drain as much power as scrolling.

That’s the beauty of E-Paper. This display technology doesn’t drain power when it’s idle. Instead, it drains power whenever the screen changes.

Changing the screen requires moving physical particles, and E-Paper technology isn’t designed to provide smooth animations, so the rapid screen refresh required to depict typing and scrolling takes a much bigger bite out of battery life than other phones. As a result, when used heavily, minimal phones can revert to being phones that last only a day or two.

Conclusion

The Minimalist’s E-Ink display is intentionally designed to make it difficult to view social media, videos, and photos, but the full QWERTY keyboard and Android platform make it a great modern messaging device.

It’s a great smartphone for reading, but its performance falls short; it doesn’t support 5G, and its camera isn’t worth using. If you do more reading than watching and want to cut down on social media use, a minimalist phone might be right for you.

However, most smartphones have focus modes or other software tools that can temporarily block out distractions while still providing much greater value.