The square phone I wanted to love

the Enter Mind One Pro Delightfully small.

I keep calling it a square phone, which isn’t quite right; The screen is square, but the phone itself is slightly rectangular. The camera flips up so you can use it to take selfies — and you can even open it partially to use as a stand or as a sort of PopSocket. there Click style keyboard accessory It also adds a magnetic ring and a headphone jack. I tried so hard to like this phone, but this phone is lacking no matter how you look at it.

I used it like a regular phone. I downloaded a simple launcher and tried to use it as a kind of dumb phone. I set the keyboard case. I took off the keyboard case. Nothing seems right.

I First met with MindOne Pro At CES back in January. They’re made by Ikko, a Shenzhen-based company that has mainly produced earphones and audio accessories until now. The MindOne Pro is the company’s design for a small smartphone, or an AI-powered gadget, or… both, I guess. It ships globally and is priced at $499, though it’s currently marked down to $429 on the company’s website.

Despite the magic of the devices, I noticed a few yellow flags right away when it got noticeably warm while I was setting it up. Initial setup is always a hassle for a phone’s processor, but the MindOne got noticeably hotter that first day out of the box than most phones I use. After a week, the weather has settled down a bit, although it doesn’t take much to warm it up again.

Battery life is also pretty dismal. I watched it drop from the mid-90s to the 60s over the course of an hour and a half, and I wasn’t doing anything too strenuous. Scrolling through reels, browsing on Google Maps, and streaming some music — over Wi-Fi — was enough to consume a third of the phone’s battery in less than two hours. This doesn’t feel good.

The bad news keeps coming. The new camera design is a good idea, but the camera itself stinks. Color processing is everywhere. It usually handles daylight well, but photos taken under dim indoor lighting look too green.

A square phone screen is great in theory — at least until you remember that the mobile web is designed for vertical rectangles. The phone’s default behavior is to fill the entire screen area, which means cropping in the middle of vertical videos and websites. It’s not perfect and the on-screen keyboard fills more than half of the display area.

Fortunately, Ikko includes some controls under the quick settings to help alleviate this. There’s a toggle for resolution, which fits more content on the screen, and a toggle to change the display to a vertical aspect ratio with black bars on either side of the screen. This is useful on occasions when you’re faced with text boxes and date pickers that don’t work on a square screen, even though it means you’re dealing with a smaller display area within an already small screen.

Maybe that’s the point, though. I can appreciate the MindOne more if I look at it as a simple phone or an alternative phone to use on the weekends. I like the idea of ​​something like a Light phone that doesn’t simply launch amazing apps like Instagram that I can’t seem to stop. But sometimes you need an Uber, so I have a problem with simple phones that seem too limited. MindOne could be an alternative – sure, you can open the Instagram app, but it’s such a bad experience, you’ll probably do it less often. Maybe I lack willpower, but I found myself scrolling through Instagram just as much, except having a worse time. The best simple phone is a cellular smart watchEtc etc etc

I even have a hard time recommending a keyboard case. Again, it sounds great in theory. There’s a small battery inside and you can flip the switch to charge the phone while you’re using it. But in a way, the keys are more complicated than just typing with an on-screen keyboard. Maybe I’m out of practice because I swear I was really fast on my Blackberry Curve, but I actually found it to be slower and more cumbersome than the virtual keys. However, the headphone jack is a thoughtful touch.

There’s a whole other launcher on MindOne Pro dedicated to AI applications and I’m not sure I understand the point of it. It offers a chatbot that allows you to switch between LLMs, as well as a notes app. Since Ikko is a Chinese company, I wondered how it would handle questions that the Chinese government might not like. I asked him if Hong Kong was part of China; She responded in Spanish for some reason and said she couldn’t help me with my question. It also comes with a global eSIM that you can turn on — it’s free to use with the AI ​​launcher, but you have to pay to use it for messaging and the like. Connection is slow, at least in my neck of the woods in Seattle.

As charming as the idea is, I think a phone like this is always going to have a hard time. Fighting to look at web pages and applications designed for rectangles through a square-shaped window is just a losing battle. Maybe instead of a square phone, what the world really needs is a small, rectangular phone with modern bells and whistles. Did you hear that, phone makers? I literally beg any company to make an iPhone Mini again with a USB-C charging port and battery Who doesn’t die in the middle of the day. The MindOne is not that phone, at least for me. Maybe it’s for someone who is easy on the battery and not picky about camera quality. The rest of us will have to keep searching.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge