Don’t feel bad or at least don’t feel alone. Such is generally my luck too.

One thing has become abundantly clear: You, me, and so many others in the comments here need to be in charge of phone design and not whoever’s been doing it for the last 10 years.

I’d love to see the keyboards and trackballs manufactured again if for no other purpose than having them available for other projects.

There was a project a while back called Beepberry that was a little handheld Linux thing that used Blackberry keyboards. Among other reasons, the supply of the Blackberry keyboards dried up so the project died.

I pre-ordered last June and got it toward the end of July. It seems to ship directly from the factory in Hong Kong, so you have to use the tracking link they send you until it clears customs in your country.

I did a first impressions post about it when I got it.

I’m really starting to feel like Android 11 is the “Windows 7” of Android.

I had the LG Genesis that was the spiritual successor to the enV. Loved the form factor but the battery life was abysmal at like 2 hours of use. Yay Android 2.2 lol.

Gemini PDA

Is that the one from PlanetCom? I’ve been looking at both their Gemini and Cosmo Communicator. Both were out of stock when I ended up going with the Minimal.

Source

Looks pretty pocketable (and gorgeous) to me.

I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.

just plain boredom with glass slabs

This. So much this. They’re all boring, too tall, and too skinny with about as much personality as a used up dryer sheet. It’s like they’re designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop. I remember being able to actually do things on my older smartphones (RDP, SSH, editing documents/spreadsheets, etc). You can still do those things now, but you basically have to break out a bluetooth keyboard to do anything more than the most basic things and it feels like trying to look at a panorama through a keyhole.

Sounds about right. I held onto my 16:9 OnePlus 3 until the battery completely gave out in 2023 or so. It was the perfect size, and I hated the 2:1 ones that came after. Tried a OP Nord N200 for about a week but returned it.

Daily driving the Minimal Phone now. It’s not the highest resolution by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s 4:3 and makes current phones look even skinnier than when I was used to 16:9.

The only thing preventing me from looking into this further is it’s yet another tall-skinny phone. I don’t know which manufacturer popularized that ridiculous aspect ratio, but I hate them and everyone who followed suit.

Dunno how I missed this, but I referenced this post as a reply to another and am just now seeing it.

The box I ssh into is headless, and AFAIK, use of /media/{user}/{mountpoint} is just a desktop environment convention. When I plug in any kind of removable media to this box, I manually mount it under /mnt. I mount my NAS’s media share to /media mostly for convenience since that’s the main purpose of this box in my workshop.

Not that I’d own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it’d look like this later that day:

Yeah, that one took me a minute. I think “drip” or “slow drip”? I know “drip” used to be a term but was never one I associated with “screwball” or “crackpot”. Usually I’d heard “drip” to mean something closer to “dull” or “boring”.

Pretty decent unless there’s a lot of animation / video in them. Calling, texting, looking up something on the internet, bank app, auth app, etc all work great. Some of the stock Android components don’t work super great with it, though, like the quick action buttons (though, arguably, they don’t work great on any Android phone either lol).

Feels sluggish at times but that’s just the e-ink being what it is. I mostly treat it like a dumb phone that’s also an e-reader.

I’ve always joked that coding as a hobby is just digital knitting lol.

I’ve gradually weaned off of smartphones over the last 18 months. Currently daily-driving the Minimal Phone and loving its distraction-free (or at least distraction-lite) ways.

I may not be analog like the article is highlighting, but I have basically eliminated the doom scrolling and have reignited my passion for reading (the one “distraction” the Minimal Phone does well is being an e-reader since it’s got an e-ink screen).

Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025

I’m just going to ignore the irony of that and appreciate it at face value 😆

Ooh, I haven’t tried RTL-SDR on it yet, but I think I’m nearing capacity on what it can do at once lol.

Here’s the block diagram for it (in spoiler below). Everything’s up and running except the Bluetooth Receiver -> Snapcast (it works on the bench but I don’t have the scripting/automation done yet). I’m also adding an SMA connector for an external antenna, but the new base part is still printing. Photo shows it “as is” of this writing.

SSL for the web apps was a PITA since I wanted real certs. Had to make a wildcard domain under my main hobby domain, so all my apps are like “https://{APP_NAME}.mobile.mydomain.xyz/”

As soon as I can get the Bluetooth + Pulseaudio scripting done, I’m gonna try to do a write up and maybe a show/tell post.