Punkt. MP02: The Phone for the Global Minimalist. Leaving the Safety Blanket

I have a confession to make. I’m a bad expat. Since moving from the US to Denmark five years ago, I haven’t thrown myself into the local culture like I should have. Instead, technology has allowed me to opt out of discomfort and deprive myself of the personal growth that comes from a move this dramatic. 

You don’t have to make new friends, your old friends can still reach you just as easily. I still listen to my same podcasts, keep most of my same routines. Complicated document I don’t feel like struggling through in Danish? The translation app can handle that. Not sure the best way to get to a restaurant? Pull up maps and turn your brain off. 

This isn’t just a problem for me. A few years ago we had a foreign exchange student from Norway live with us in Chicago. While living on his phone, he maintained the relationships back home. While he might have been physically in Chicago, but mentally he was still in Norway. He missed out on what makes it incredible and fulfilling to leave what you know and move somewhere new because of a digital cocoon that let him control exactly how immersed he was. As it turns out, I wasn’t any better. 

So when I got the MP02 to try out, I was really excited. Could this device help me get over my hesitation? If I took the safety blanket away, would I become more comfortable in this place? Or would it result in a complete disaster? No better time to find out than summer in Copenhagen. 

Opening the box, it’s hard not to draw some obvious comparisons to the work of designers like Dieter Rams and Jonny Ive. Upon closer inspection, I think it’s closer to the work of Konstantin Grcic. My phone was a beautiful light blue with a nice typography on the keys and throughout the UI. All the buttons feel great, like an AT&T phone from the 1980s that your grandma would have mounted on the wall. The screen is small but of high quality and easy to read, even in bright light.

The UI takes some time to get used to. I set aside a few hours to get the hang of things. The circle icon, or Punkt button, is the select button with a back button. There are shortcut keys, but the shortcut keys don’t trigger from inside other apps. So if you are in messages and tap contacts, it doesn’t automatically open contacts. You need to navigate back to the main menu. In practice, you get used to the “flow” of the OS quickly. It was always responsive and fast. 

First work day with the MP02 and immediately I found myself patting my pocket multiple times an hour confirming that the phone is still there. It’s so light that it really disappears into your pocket and from your mind. I worried that I would miss my podcasts during my morning bike commute and Slack notifications, but once I got into the groove of the ride, it was really zen. The experience wasn’t the complete blank memory that the ride normally is.

The first work day did have a few hiccups. Denmark is largely a cashless society, with small companies accepting peer-to-peer payments called MobilePay and everyone else accepts contactless payments. The lack of Apple Pay did cause a “duh” moment as I stood in line at 7-11 buying a coffee and had to stop myself from tapping the MP02 against the card reader. It turns out that credit cards still work like I remember, though.

As the week went on, I did find myself well and truly bored for the first time in years. You realize that every single time there was a dull second in your day, you grab your phone and scroll endlessly. Sitting in the boredom encouraged me to do exactly what I had been avoiding, which was having conversations with strangers. It turns out the push I needed was drinking a coffee at a local coffee shop and desperate for something to break up the silence of staring out the window. Despite my concerns and mental anguish, it was actually great, delightful little chats where I got to try out my Danish and then leave. I never would have done that normally.

Where the MP02 really shines is when I was outside playing with my daughter. While I love playing with her, I have trouble keeping my focus on her. There is always a new notification, a new light buzz on my wrist that once I know it is there, I can’t think of anything else until I look. But the second I look, I feel terrible because it is rude to stop interacting with a person to check your phone. Plus, the notifications are always worthless pieces of information that get pushed to my phone for no reason, so then I feel stupid on top of being a rude person. Let’s stop making core childhood memories I’ll treasure forever because my bank wants me to know about a new credit card.

Suddenly there was none of that. If it mattered, the person would call. If it didn’t then I could just focus on the person directly in front of me. It was relaxing for both of us. You just get a lot more out of social interactions when there isn’t something in your subconscious bugging you about whether you would be having more fun on your phone than talking to this person.

Speaking of calls, they worked well from the MP02. Call quality was good, and I found myself turning to voice calls as the primary way to reach out to people since I’m nowhere near my old T9 texting speed. Considering that I made roughly one phone call a month before the phone swap, this was quite the change for me. Also fun fact, it’s often 10 times as fast to find out what a person wants by calling them and talking for 15 minutes vs texting for 3 hours.

Battery life was ok. This isn’t the Nokia brick of your childhood. Just phone and text were gentle on the battery, but tethering would wipe out the charge pretty quickly. The MP02 charges quickly with a standard USB-A to C cable. It didn’t charge with a USB-C PD charger and required the A to C. This is a common thing but as more phones standardize on USB-C end to end this is something to keep in mind when planning a travel charger. I certainly had plenty left at the end of a full day but this isn’t a phone you can charge once a week.

So did it work? Did more thoughtful use of technology help me to engage with the world around me? Without question it made a difference, if for nothing else than needing to pay more attention to the world around me. With tethering you still have the safety blanket of technology with a full iPad in my backpack ready to deploy whenever I needed it, but for most tasks I found I didn’t really need it. You need to spend more time reading signs and looking at maps, but I actually enjoyed it. Struggling through a complicated document in Danish makes my Danish better. This is the classical experience of moving somewhere new, with all the struggles and triumphs of daily life.

The biggest value was the sense of more control. I didn’t feel like my day was being taken away from me one notification at a time. I was just fully in the thing I was doing. It was empowering to remind myself that you don’t have to be available instantly. I am still using the MP02 regularly and it’s the perfect vacation phone. 

Mathew D.