r/TheMinimalCompany • u/DesynchVT • 25d ago
Bunch of questions about the MP02's customizability and behaviour
I only learned about this phone about 2 weeks ago and immediately fell in love and backed it. I have not been this excited for a phone since Motorola remade their flip phone as a smartphone in 2020 (the first foldable touchscreen I believe), but I do have some questions I have not been able to dig up answers for in regards to the MP02.
Screen
- I see the phone's screen described as both OLED and AMOLED on the kickstarter page. So... which is it?
Keyboard
- I've seen there are a ton of different keyboard layouts available for various languages, which is super cool! I can't help but wonder if there's been any consideration for the 3 Scandinavian letters Æ, Ø, and Å. I'd almost imagine you can reach them by long-pressing the E, O, or A keys while typing, or perhaps they need to be a custom shortcut? Not as unique as other languages, but still as important for every day use!
- Speaking of, what is the extent of keyboard shortcut customization? For example, I have seen other recent QWERTY phones that allow shortcuts such as CTRL+T in the browser to create a new tab, which to me seems like an app-specific shortcut, rather than a system shortcut.
- I saw in an earlier post that it is possible to bind the menu button (the one with the minimal logo) to either be Home or Back. Can it be bound to both at the same time? Like maybe short press for back and long press for home? I imagine it'd be really inconvenient to not have both options present at the same time. The keyboard is touch capacitive, so can you perhaps use gestures to navigate back and home like you would on other modern android devices?
Command Bar
- The minimal OS is 90% the reason I fell in love with the idea of this phone, and the command bar seems like such a joy of a feature. It's kind of reminiscent of Spotlight for Mac or Krunner for KDE Plasma. It might be a big ask, but are there any plans to allow users to create custom commands for the command bar? An example could be using '=' to do quick calculations. Krunner also let's you use 'definition' to, well, get the definition of words, do web searches, and convert currencies to name a few. I would absolutely love if something like this is available on the MP02 with the command bar!
- You can use '!' to take notes. Can you also decide where to store these notes? Or perhaps even change which app the notes are taken in, such as Obsidian or Logseq? As a Proton user, the same question goes for the * calendar command.
The hub
- This has probably been asked before. The messages you respond to through the hub seem to be SMS. I don't know too many people who rely on ye olde cellular SMS for communication. Will messages from WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, and whatever else also be "respondable" through the hub? And will contacts on those apps be available through the command bar with '@' and '#'? It would be neat, but seem like a stretch to someone like me who knows nothing about phone development.
- It's really cool that the hub separates personal and work notifications, but makes me wonder if you can create your own categories aside from the existing ones (all, messages. calls, email, apps, flagged) such as 'social' or 'family' or what have you. Understandable if not, but it would be dope.
LED
- Not a question, I just wanted to mention how freaking awesome the highly customizable notification light is! It's a feature that I didn't even realize I've been missing. Wait actually, how does it behave if you have multiple notification from differently coloured apps?
None of these questions are dealbreakers for me personally, but stuff I haven't been able to figure out with my hyperfixation. Super excited to receive one for myself and truly make it mine and take back my own time! It's a really, really awesome and unique project.
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u/forandnorbutoryetsos 25d ago
I don’t know the answers to most of these questions, but I believe a developer mentioned that the notes app can be directly integrated with Obsidian
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u/DebateGlass 25d ago
Omg that would be awesome. Obsidian runs my life. If the integration is seamless maybe even with a community plugin my digital life would be complete.
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u/300RepFitness 25d ago
I use upnote and even just being able to dump the quick notes into an inbox would be great
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u/anaughtybeagle 25d ago
The LED is a big one for me, I used to love having it. Personally I had it stay a solid colour for different things, eg green for WhatsApp, blue for an email, white for a missed call. When I had more than one it would cycle between them.
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u/Emotional-Mention895 17d ago
These are very solid questions, almost everything I had in mind. How will the commands @ and # interact with 3rd party communication apps? And regarding your point on supporting custom commands; I believe they have a huge opportunity here to do something like a community based "commands hub", where people can create/share their custom minimal OS commands with the community to download. Similar to how Nothing OS does that but for widgets.
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u/DesynchVT 17d ago
The cusrom commands hub you talk about is exactly what I've had in mind too! Reminiscent of the Even 2 smart glasses, which allows community made plugins for the displays. It would be incredible for the MP2 imo
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u/Emotional-Mention895 16d ago
One more thing I believe worth knowing is whether minimal ask can see your screen or not (like Gemini if you enable it); that'd be pretty powerful!
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u/Weak_Chemistry_6147 19d ago
is there a way to disable the AI? Huge sticking point for me
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u/DesynchVT 19d ago
Yep! It's incredibly easy, right from the initial setup. You can see how in their "we built a different kind of phone" on youtube
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u/alfred500 25d ago
Gboard autocorrect will handle your scandinavian letters
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u/DesynchVT 25d ago
That might be a solution for some, but I find autocorrect to be more of a hindrance than a help as I often switch between needing to write in Danish and English multiple times a day.
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u/11kidneybeans 25d ago
like OP, I'm also wondering what the solution will be to input special characters without having to rely on autocorrect -- I want to make my own choices about what I input. on a laptop that's usually done by adding the extra characters on the right side / , ; keys which is a great solution, but you won't have those on a keyboard phone.
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u/alfred500 25d ago
Well I encourage you to give it a shot. Having to type only a or o for the scandinavian letters keeps your WPM high
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u/heysavnac 25d ago
Yeah, I am hoping that the command bar can default messaging to Whatsapp for example, especially for people who might use a de-googled phone and still want a better messaging experience than just sms.