Yeah, I’ve got all those turned off. Actually, they came disabled by default (one of the OS customizations Minimal does in their base image). I usually turn those to at least .5x on my other phones to make things feel faster, lol, but in this case, they were already off.

But there’s still subtle transitions and some animations that aren’t affected by that. One of the latter is the animations on the lock screen when you’re entering your pin. Those have to be disabled separately in the security settings (and weren’t disabled by default by Minimal).

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.

Quite possibly. I don’t think I have anything running below A11 that still functions so that’s been my baseline. Most recent was my OP3 that had LineageOS’s A9 but the battery finally gave up the ghost a few months ago.

Yep, to all of that.

disable that annoying “you haven’t used those apps in a while so permissions were removed” thigny

AFAIK, you can only do that on an app-by-app basis.

Settings -> Apps -> {App} -> Permissions -> Pause app activity if unused

That’s on Android 14, so YMMV if they took that away or made it worse since then.

AFAIK, it’s just the base Android UI because it’s the same in LineageOS and vanilla builds.

• The quick actions have gone to hell. There’s nothing quick about them anymore and customizing them is even worse than it already was.
• Every UI element is oversized and seems made for the hot doggiest of hotdog fingers
• The organization of the settings, especially the network/mobile settings, somehow makes even less sense than before
• You can’t configure a wifi profile without a gateway. God forbid I want to do anything on a local network.
• You can’t disable the connectivity checker and Android treats not being able to reach Google with not having internet. And if there’s no internet, you have about 5 seconds to catch the prompt to stay connected otherwise it’ll disconnect.
• Even if you do catch the prompt to stay connected to the no-internet wifi, the DNS resolver will not use its DNS server unless you’re in airplane mode. I’ve got a RasPi-based “internet in a box” mobile server that’s useless when accessing it via my phone (unless in airplane mode) because I had the sheer audacity to configure it to use proper DNS hostnames and SSL certs.
• The wallpaper / background config is just awful nowadays. I don’t know if that’s “Material You” or what, but just let me pick an image or no image or a solid color. Don’t present 3 different apps to handle changing the background, two of which do nothing.
• On the Google side, they’re shoving more Gemini shit in
• Now Google is gatekeeping even the apps you want to sideload
• Even with animations disabled, there’s still too many animations/transitions. I’m using an e-ink phone and this alone just destroys the experience.
• Gesture navigation is just terrible but at least you can dig through the settings to re-enable 3 button nav
• A litany of other small gripes

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.

• “Up to…” when used to describe things like internet speeds
• “Wholesome” when used to describe food. Not really a lie, per se, but “wholesome” has absolutely no meaning when it comes to nutrition and just sounds good
• “Zero calories” or 0 grams of [blank] in the nutrition information. The regulations let them round down if it’s less than 1 gram standard unit of measurement for that item (edited from grams).
• Any time you see “free” there’s always at least an implied asterisk