Punkt MP02 First Look Review

Technology is a funny old bird.

We get sold on a particular feature – like the ability to make social phone calls to friends and family – but find ourselves quickly overwhelmed by myriad extraneous features that distract us from our intentions.

This is where the Punkt MP02 feature phone intervenes: adding a step between my sociable intentions and the pernicious distractions of my ‘smart’ devices.

Note: Punkt sent me this MP02 gratis. Of course, it’s lovely to receive such a kind gift, and you would be forgiven for being suspicious about this the honesty of this review. But please suspend your doubt – as you will see, I’m far too reliant on connectivity to tolerate a device that doesn’t work properly!

The Punkt MP02 as a minimum viable technology

I’ve written before about using the minimum viable technology for a task, and the Punkt MP02 fits perfectly into my buffet of devices.

The MP02 does only two things really well:

  1. Phone calls.
  2. 4G tethering.

It does a few other things, like messaging and note-taking, but it doesn’t do them very well. These features are more for emergencies than day-to-day use.

Using the Punkt MP02 in combination with my laptop and my smartphone, I can still take part in extraneous ‘connected’ activities, without turning them into reflex habits.

But, best of all, the Punkt and I now prioritise phone calls.

Has the Punkt changed my behaviour?

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, or, as the saying goes, in the device use statistics.

With the Punkt in my digital arsenal, I’ve averaged only 15 minutes a day on my smartphone. For comparison, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the week immediately pre-Punkt was around 60 minutes per day.

Looking back over the longer term, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the last two months has been about 45 minutes a day – and that’s with a conscious effort to reduce my smartphone usage after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

It seems that, with the Punkt, I could be saving 30-45 minutes a day, a remarkable return for the device thus far.

I have also made more phone calls to friends and family with the Punkt than I used to with the smartphone. In my first week with the Punkt, I made 5 ‘social’ phone calls for a total duration of 110 minutes, averaging about 22 minutes each.

In comparison, over the preceding six weeks, I made 9 similarly social calls on my smartphone, lasting a total of 180 minutes. On average, that makes only 2 calls every week.

These smartphone calls were still around 20 minutes each, which reassures me that I’m comparing apples with apples, but with the Punkt, it seems as if I’m more than twice as likely to pick up the phone and call friends and family. Brilliant.

This might, of course, be down to novelty. It’ll be interesting to see whether I continue to spend significantly less time on my smartphone, as the unnecessary habit degrades, or whether instead I begin to crave the convenience of the ‘smart’ features I do use.

Which brings me on to…

Do I still need a smartphone?

There are several features for which I know I will still use my smartphone.

  1. Maps. Connectivity is not necessary: I have downloaded maps for offline use.
  2. Camera. Wifi will be needed to transfer these from phone to computer.
  3. Whatsapp messaging. I prefer to use my computer for the actual sending of messages, but this is only possible with a ‘smart’ connection as well.
  4. Strava tracking for bike rides.
  5. Banking apps. Not strictly necessary, but I can’t be the only person who finds the mobile apps easier to use than the web equivalents.

As you can tell, none of these activities are urgent. I could survive without any of them. Does that mean I will get rid of my smartphone? No.

My smartphone is still, for better or worse, the minimum viable technology for that grab bag of low-priority, but still useful features.

I’m not going to buy a dedicated camera because I hardly ever take photos. Photography isn’t a priority for me. Likewise, I’m unlikely to buy a Garmin GPS for my bike: they’re expensive and I’m not massively into following pre-planned routes.

It remains to be seen whether the Punkt MP02 has turned the smartphone into one useful tool among many, rather than one dominant tool to rule them all (and me) – but that is the hope.

Pros, Not bothereds, Cons and a Wishlist

With the psychological and practical aspects of the review dealt with, let’s look at the phone in more detail. What works, what I don’t care about, what doesn’t work, and what could work.

Pros (for me)

  • The phone works as a phone – hallelujah! This is huge.
  • Tethering works as well as with my old smartphone (after help from the excellent customer support team). This is also huge.
  • Excellent customer support, fortunately, because the phone needs it. It can’t be easy designing and launching an entirely new genus of phone, and early adopters need support.
  • Beautifully designed and feels good in my hand. I’ve dropped it a couple of times already and it seems robust.
  • BlackBerry security. Hopefully this means that my phone can’t be hacked. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what this means in practice: presumably the protection doesn’t extend to tethered devices. I’ve written before about the leaky nature of mobile phones, and how this data is big business. It feels good to own a device that, for once, puts my privacy first.

Not bothereds (for me)

  • For a simple phone, there’s quite a going on. I can connect to other devices using Bluetooth, WiFi and a USB connection. I genuinely have no idea why the phone has GPS.
  • There are a panoply of other unobtrusive features, including messaging, calculator, calendar, alarm, world clock, stopwatch, timer, and notes with timed reminders (including recurring reminders). They all seem to work well, but I doubt I’ll use any of them much.
  • The messaging system can display emoticons and QR codes. Wowzas.

Cons (for me)

UPDATE: Punkt are currently manufacturing an update to the MP02 which will be available in July 2019. Hopefully many of the bugs listed below will be fixed – and they have kindly offered me an exchange. As I said earlier, the customer service is excellent.

You can read my updated review here.

This is quite a long list, so I’ve bolded the cons that have a significant negative impact on my day-to-day use.

  • Limited battery life. The Punkt’s battery life is currently only about a day of light to moderate use. A couple of phone calls, a couple of hours’ hotspotting, and it’s dead. Even on standby, the battery drains remarkably quickly. Overnight, on aeroplane mode, I lost 15%. Frankly, compared to other feature phones, it’s feeble – and very nearly a deal breaker. Luckily, Punkt’s engineers are working on a solution and hope to release another firmware update in June. Watch this space…
  • I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises (key-pad tones, lock and unlock tones, etc.). For a phone that sells itself on discretion, this seems very odd. The excellent customer service people don’t appear to have a solution either. What this means is that, for the sake of my sanity, I have to have the phone on silent all the time. It does vibrate, however, so I usually hear something buzz when someone calls.
  • The ringtones might be ‘the work of respected Norwegian sound artist Kjetil Røst Nilsen’, but in my humble opinion, they are all a bit weird. It’s not possible to upload my own, although they do say this might be a feature for a future update.
  • Likewise, I can’t change the alarm noise, which is unfortunate because it sounds like I’m under attack from quite a raucous seagull. Not the most relaxing way to wake up.
  • The earphones aren’t very good quality and only come with one earpiece. They are USB-C, though, so I could buy a new set, I guess.
  • You can programme shortcuts, which is handy. This would be a pro, but isn’t very well done so becomes a con, I’m afraid. The options are fairly limited and the execution isn’t always as clear as it could be. I set a shortcut to turn on tethering, but there is no notification that the shortcut has executed successfully, and I can’t set a shortcut to turn tethering off.
  • The power source is USB-C, so I can’t share chargers with most of the rest of the world yet, and heaven help me if I lose this one cable before I get a chance to buy a backup. A bit harsh to make this a con, but there we go.
  • I’ve also run into quite a few glitches:
    • I’ve experienced a few (5) dropped calls. It’s hard to say whether these were down to the Punkt or the caller’s phone. I’ll keep an eye/ear on it.
    • I had to restart after the home screen stopped working.
    • The notifications don’t always behave as they should.
    • The home screen clock takes a few seconds to update. (This bug seems to come and go.)
    • USB tethering only worked once and never again. Shame, because it could be a useful feature to keep the phone charged while using the battery-intensive hotspot.

Wishlist (for me)

  • I would love a voice note feature so that I could record notes to myself, rather than type them out, tortuously, on the predictive keypad.
  • A torch would be handy.

The Bottom Line

For me, at the moment, the Punkt MP02 just about crosses the line. After a week’s testing, I will definitely keep the Punkt in my pocket.

The annoying ring tones, the various glitches, and the more significant issue with the battery life, are still not enough to outweigh the importance of untethering myself from my smartphone.

I need a phone that keeps me in contact with friends and family, without distracting me from the way I want to spend my time. The miraculous little Punkt MP02 helps me do that.

If I were grading the phone as a whole, however, I couldn’t give it more than a B-Minus. Everything about the Punkt screams Premium – but I’d be a bit gutted if I’d shelled out the £300 asking price for a dumbphone that scarcely lasts a day, and does some pretty annoying things.

If they can sort out the myriad glitches, and significantly improve the battery life with the next firmware update, then we’ll be talking about a phone that delivers not only on the promise of digital minimalism, but also on the premium price point.

But the real test for me will be whether I decide to take the Punkt MP02 when I go travelling this summer.

When I’m out of the country, my reliance on the web increases. I’m much more likely to want to connect to look up places to go. I’m much more likely to stay in communication with friends and family over email and Whatsapp, and I’m much more likely to be away from my computer and a fixed WiFi connection.

Finally, space and weight are a consideration and, although the Punkt is small and light, every inch and every gramme counts when I’m travelling. The fact that I have no other devices that charge from a USB-C is another slight point against the Punkt.

So the Punkt has 3 months to prove itself indispensable!


Thanks a mill to Punkt for sending me this MP02, and thanks to their customer service team for helping me get it up and running. Thanks also to @documentally for putting me in touch with Punkt in the first place.

Digital Minimalism Tech tips from Cal Newport

Not using computers for one day a week is fine as far as it goes, but it can’t go particularly far when you earn your crust within the confines of the information economy.

So what are we to do the other 6 days a week?

After devouring the excellent Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I’ve been flush with ideas.

I’ve written before about what I call minimum viable technology, but Cal puts it nicely:

‘The power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.’

I found Cal’s most effective recommendation was using an app called Freedom to set boundaries on the multi-tasking powers of my technology.

With Freedom I can set an automated schedule of when I’m able to check email and Whatsapp, the two major distractions from focused time in my life.

Rather than slavishly checking for superficial social interactions every five or twenty minutes, I can corral those messages into fenced-off playgrounds of digital distraction. But the playground is only open for an hour in the afternoon.

The app works across devices as well. Using Freedom I can turn my smartphone in to a single-use dumb phone at the touch of a button. I can even have the smartphone capabilities turned off by default.

The feeling is indeed one of liberation; no wonder the app is called Freedom.

If you have any sense that your devices are distracting you from the deep work that you value, I urge you to give Freedom a whirl. It is free to try, but a year’s subscription is only £13 if you use the code FOCUS40.

5 Ideas from Digital Minimalism

1. Swap phones.

When you’re with a friend, swap phones so neither of you can be lured away to the dreaded ‘third place’. Your phones are still there in an emergency, but the embarrassment of asking for your device just so that you can crush some candy will be too much.

2. Spend time alone.

Solitude is vital to our emotional balance and too little time alone leaves us feeling anxious. Finding solitude doesn’t mean ship-wrecking yourself on a desert island; you can find solitude in a busy coffee shop. Solitude is simply time spent without input from other minds. Leave your phone at home. Take a long walk. Write.

3. Use digital to facilitate real world comms.

Social media, email and messaging is not an adequate replacement for social interaction, but our brains can be fooled into thinking it is. Set up a meeting on the phone or in person.

4. Hold conversation office hours.

Tell your friends and family that you’re always free to speak on the phone at X o’clock – and be available at that time. When someone ‘pings’ you a text message or email, invite them to call you at X o’clock any day of the week. Alternatively, set up a regular time for taking coffee or a walk and invite anyone and everyone to drop by.

5. Prioritise strenuous leisure activities over passive consumption.

Activity gives you more energy, not less. When you’re tired, simply switch task. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. Become ‘handy’. Join or set up a club, community group or meeting.

I believe in Minimum Viable Technology

How many devices have you looked at this morning?

I’m on seven.

  • I checked the time on my bedside travel clock
  • I listened to a comedy on my DAB radio
  • I used a stopwatch to time my press ups
  • I wrote my diary using a typewriter
  • I sent a text message on my feature phone
  • I took a photograph with my smartphone
  • I typed these words into my computer

You’ll note that all of these tasks could have been accomplished using only one tool: my smartphone. So why have seven devices when I could have only one?

After all, the smartphone does many things excellently.

Most people in the world will never have owned a camera as good as the one on the back of their smartphone (myself included).

Smartphones have normalised the miracle of GPS navigation, made mobile internet access a pocketable habit, and serve us as powerful micro-computers whose potential is limited only (it seems) by the imaginations of app developers.

I have used my smartphone to practice yoga, answer emails, chat with work colleagues, catch up on the cricket, check train times, monitor my sleep, write blog posts and, of course, track my smartphone usage.

Incredibly, this is quite normal.

But whereas the smartphone is a complex technology, basically indistinguishable from magic to most people (myself very much included), single-purpose tools like my travel clock or DAB radio are what I call Minimum Viable Technology.

Rather than starting out with what the tool can accomplish (Ooh! Look, it’s a clock and a radio and a stopwatch and a phone and a camera AND a yoga teacher!), the principles of Minimum Viable Technology first define what you want from life (Bleeurgh, what’s the time?), and then find the simplest tool to match (a bedside travel clock).

Principles of Minimum Viable Technology

  1. Clearly define the single task at hand
  2. Use the least complex tool that still accomplishes that single task
  3. Stop. Adding. Features. Goddamit.

I believe that such Minimum Viable Technologies offer significant advantages over complex multi-purpose technologies.

1. Focus
It is too easy to switch task when using a multi-purpose tool.

We’ve all been there with smartphones and computers, but it’s equally true of other complex technologies – a house, for example.

Would I be more comfortable in the lounge or the kitchen? Should I lie on the bed or rest in a deck chair in the garden? Does the bedroom need another lick of paint, and when am I going to put up those shelves? Is the heating on too high?

It sounds ridiculous, but the plurality of options and the ease of task switching is detrimental to our ability to focus. And losing focus quite possibly makes us more miserable humans.

2. Quality
Does the blade on my Swiss Army knife have a sharper cutting edge than the cook’s knife in my kitchen? No.

Similarly, does the camera on my smartphone take better photographs than a dedicated SLR? Clearly not.

The best multi-purpose tool will never be superior to the best single-purpose tool, and that has consequences for the way we work (and play).

Are we willing to accept good enough for the best?

In many arenas, the answer will be emphatically yes, but for the most important things in life, the answer simply must be no. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?

3. Waste
There is an argument that using one device to rule them all is less wasteful, and I wouldn’t like to argue with that.

I have now seven devices where one would do and at some point all those devices will end up in landfill and their useless lumps of plastic will out-live me. I feel pretty shitty about that.

But the principles of Minimum Viable Technology tend towards less wasteful behaviour, not more.

For example, the absolute Minimum Viable Technology for cleaning my hair is, quite simply, water. Having grown up in a certain society with certain expectations, however, I have settled on using diluted lemon juice.

No more need to buy expensive (or indeed cheap) shampoos and conditioners. No more need to wonder what all those ingredients are doing to my hair (let alone what happens when I wash them down the sink).

In the final analysis, do I really need my own travel clock? Do I really need my own phone? The wide span of human history argues in the negative. I just don’t have the guts to go without.

4. Skill
If we all use multi-tools, what will become of the artisan and the artist?

The more basic the technology, generally speaking, the greater the skill you must learn and deploy.

For example, motorists who grew up in the 40s, 50s and 60s had to become semi-skilled mechanics in order to keep their cars on the road.

Modern motorists have no such need. In fact, car manufacturers deliberately make their technology unhackable, so that you have to go back to the approved dealer for repairs.

Technology, as it becomes more complex, leaves in its wake a certain kind of ignorance.

Of course, this ignorance is not always or necessarily a limitation. Drivers who don’t know the first thing about car maintenance (myself included) can instead spend their time on other pursuits – but it doesn’t make them better drivers.


Side Bar: It’s not all about ‘devices’

Technology is everything humans have ever invented to try and make our lives easier, from agriculture and money, to shampoo and footwear.

Here are some other ways that Minimum Viable Technology influences my life choices:

  • I prefer to walk than cycle, if I have the time. This often surprises people who think that I’m a devoted capital-C Cyclist. I am, but also: MVT, baby.
  • I wear ‘barefoot’ shoes that don’t over-complicate the business of keeping my feet warm, dry and protected from sharp stones.
  • I don’t have a gym membership because I can use press up bars and a yoga mat in my own bedroom.
  • I eat a primarily plant-based diet: a more simplistic diet than meat-eating in almost every way, from food production to preparation and digestion.
  • I don’t use supermarkets when there is a low tech greengrocer in town.

If in doubt don’t spend money, say no to ‘upgrades’, and always check the ingredients.


With all this in mind, I believe that my original question should be flipped: Why have only one device when I could have seven?

Rather than depending on complex multi-purpose tools for everything, I believe that we should use them as ‘catch-all’ technologies to mop up the functions that are either unimportant to us, or we simply haven’t had the courage, the time, the money or the wherewithal to replace yet.

My smartphone does only one thing better than any other device I have found: GPS mapping when I’m on my bike.

Does that make it worth having? Frankly, no. I cycled around Britain without GPS: it’s not a big deal.

But my smartphone sweeps up a few other useful functions that are nice to have, but aren’t sufficiently important to me to find a dedicated replacement.

A yoga teacher would be vastly superior to the app on my phone, but I’m just not dedicated enough to make the switch. Likewise, I don’t care enough about photography to buy an actual camera.

And so we come to the 50ft-chameleon of the personal computer.

I wrote a line to myself recently: A computer is not a crutch. And yet that is exactly how I treat it.

My computer is my workstation and playstation combined. It is my portal into the world, and the screen through which I peer. It is the medium of my creativity.

I know that my life could benefit from applying the principles of Minimum Viable Technology to those moments when I turn to my computer screen.

What do I want from life right now? It’s probably not to stand here typing, reading on a screen, or replying to emails.

This computer is so far from being a Minimum Viable Technology that it’s actively keeping me from being the person I want to be.

Woah.

I’ll see you outside!

Further Technologies

  1. Minimum Viable Technology (6 minute read). The tool is not the task. In our search for the most efficient technology, we forget that 99% of a task is not about the tools we use. Cleaning yourself is not about power showers, hot water tanks or expensive shampoos; it’s about water and scrubbing. Jumping into a lake would do it.
  2. Productivity Positive Constraints (5 minute read). The Neo is a full size keyboard with a four line screen and a memory for hundreds of thousands of words. That’s all. There’s no internet connection to distract me. There’s no hunching over an eye-straining glowing screen. There’s no clunky weight to carry around or rest on my knees. There’s no power cable because there’s hardly any technology to power so the batteries (3xAA) last for years.
  3. No Money Mondays (6 minute read). I can’t just buy a nice packet of biscuits when I feel like it; I’ve got to finish up those lentils that have been sitting in my cupboard since January. I can’t pay for the bus; I have to cycle or walk.