The Mudita Pure is a simple phone with a 2.84 inch E Ink display, a number pad, and an emphasis on the “phone” part of smartphone, although it also supports a handful of apps including a calendar, calculator, notes, alarm clock, music player, and voice recorder.
Under development for the past few years, the phone is up for pre-order for $369, and it should begin shipping relatively soon – mass production is scheduled to begin on November 15th, with the first phones expected to begin shipping November 30th. Ahead of launch, the Mudita team has also announced that the MuditaOS software powering the phone is now open source.
The now fully open-sourced MuditaOS is built on top of FreeRTOS, but it features a custom user interface, apps, and other features designed to support the Mudita Pure phone’s hardware including an E Ink display, USB-C port, and cellular radio.
The Mudita Pure phone features a 2.84 inch, 600 x 480 pixel grayscale E Ink display with 270 pixels per inch, a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 processor, 64MB of SDRAM, 16GB of eMMC storage, a 1,600 mAh user-replaceable lithium ion battery, and dual SIM support with support for 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE connections.
Unlike most modern phones, the Mudita Pure does not have any WiFi or mobile data support. But it does support Bluetooth 4.2 and you can tether it to a computer with a USB cable, allowing you to use the phone as a cellular modem for a computer when running the Mudita Center software on your PC.
The team has also open sourced that Mudita Center companion app, which, in addition to tethering, allows you to sync contacts and calendar info, and upload audio to a computer, among other things.
After the phone begins shipping, the developers also plan to open source its Mudita Launcher Android app, which lets you put a minimalistic UI on Android phones, and the Mudita Storage component of the Mudita Space set of privacy-focused apps.
A $369 feature phone, says it all. More price than substance.
Pretty interesting, but it seems a bit pricey.
I agree. The open source part is very cool. However, it would be much more interesting if it had at least WiFi, maybe 4G, and the price was much lower.
Agreed – I mean there are e-ink smartphones like the Hisense Facenote for less than $200 (with more like 6in screens). I suspect the value proposition here is mainly that it’s a dumbphone but it’s hard to see how that’s worth 6X as much as the cheap KaiOS candybar phones – e-ink is cool, but not that cool.
anti-addiction device
The hardware seems too limited to be able to track you or serve you ads, so they have to make their money in some other way…
I like the idea of KaiOS, but the implementations have been pretty attrocious. This so far looks very cool. Not for me, but I wish them success.