Punkt adds a fondleslab to its lineup of minimalist tech kit, with a very unusual build of Android - and a hefty pricetag.

The MC02 is an Android smartphone from Punkt, a boutique Swiss gadget maker which makes attractively minimalist kit. The Register has covered one of its devices before: the minimal, keypad-equipped MP02 phone in 2018.

The first thing to get out of the way is that the new MC02 phone is a premium-priced device: it goes for £599 on Amazon UK, and $699 on Amazon US. This is emphatically not a phone for the price-sensitive… but more generally, Punkt is not a brand for those worried about cost. For comparison, its AC02 alarm clock is approximately £150 (or $250). We will not examine that device's performance or its specifications, partly because that's not the point of Punkt hardware, and partly because it's a clock.

The hardware

We will try to be similarly brief about the MC02's specs, because the hardware is not the point of this product. It is a chunky matt-black textured slab, with a 6.67 inch 2400×1080 screen and 3.5mm headphone and USB sockets. It has 6GB of RAM, 128GB of flash, and a 5500mAh battery. It can fast-charge at 33W by cable, or 18W wirelessly. The big battery makes it feel reassuringly hefty in the hand: it's just over 1cm (or 0.4 of an inch) thick and weighs 230g (eight ounces). Battery life is excellent: in light use, we got about a week from a charge. It has a 64MP rear camera and a 24MP front one, and the power button conceals a fingerprint sensor. It can communicate over 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and NFC. The card carrier has space for either two nanoSIM cards, or one SIM and a TF card for storage, but it's worth noting that it doesn't support eSIMs.

One of the few unusual features about the hardware also tells you something about its intended use. Along with the usual power button and volume control on the right edge, it has a second physical button on the left edge, but this is not a programmable button, like on some smartphones: it only has one function, which is turned off by default. When you press it, the phone instantly goes into flight mode. That's all the button does. Notably, it won't turn flight mode off again; for that you must pull down the quick-settings drawer.

This is a phone for people who don't want to be distracted by their phone all the time. Rather than pairing it with a smartwatch, bringing those distractions (both literally and metaphorically) even closer to hand , we suspect owners would be more likely to complement the MC02 with a mechanical watch with no electronics whatsoever… quite possibly also Swiss.

The software

The differentiating feature of the MC02 is its OS, which Punkt calls Apostrophy, or "Aphy" for short. It's a custom version of Android built on AOSP 13 - specifically, upon the privacy-centric GrapheneOS (formerly called the Android Hardening project). Aphy inherits a few visible features from GrapheneOS, such as the Vanadium web browser, a locked-down ad-blocking version of Chromium.

Aphy is very much in active development, and this is one reason why we're reviewing the MC02 now, although we've had the device for six months: last month, Punkt released a new version, Aphy MC02.20240621.U0, and some more functionality suddenly started working, making it rather more usable.

Aphy is unlike any other Android-based OS we've seen, even comparing it to other de-Googled Android phones such as the Murena One with /e/ OS. The home screen is minimalist and monochrome: over the blank black wallpaper, there's a large sans-serif digital clock in the center, and at the bottom, a few rows of grayscale icons. That's all - and you can't change it. Unlike every other smartphone we've ever seen, the main screen can't be customized.

The monochrome color scheme reflects that these applications are in a secure enclave. Their storage can't be seen by any normal Android apps, and is backed up to Punkt's cloud servers in Switzerland. The company has a list of security features and video demonstrations so you can see how it looks. Some of the tools you might expect are here, such as Calendar, Contacts, and Email apps, plus a Tasks app and a file manager. Some of the others are less typical: the Digital Nomad VPN service, the Aphy Store, and a tool for managing your Aphy account.

This latter is significant, because some of the value-added Aphy services are subscription-based. A new MC02 comes with one year's subscription, but after, it costs CHF 14.99 (£13.40/$17.15) per month, or CHF 11.99 (£10.72/$13.72) per month if you pay for a year in advance. For this, you get securely hosted email, calendar, contacts, and tasks, a VPN connection which can make you seem to be in Germany, the USA or Japan, plus 5GB of cloud storage. The Email app on the home screen only talks to aphy.io email addresses: if you want anything else, you need to add another client or use webmail.

Strangely, there's also a permanent icon for installing a sandboxed version of Google Play Services, which you'll almost certainly need if you want to install other Android apps on the device. Perhaps in some future update, this could be hidden once used.

There are also some slightly surprising omissions from the home screen. In the center, there's an Apostrophy home button. (This looks like it's composed of a sans-serif apostrophe and a bullet point, superimposed slightly off-center. It looks odd, but is used throughout the branding.) Swiping upwards on this button opens a fairly standard app drawer, in which there are a selection of other apps with greyscale icons: the Vanadium web browser, Settings, Camera, and Messaging. They're also secured versions, but their data lives on your device rather than in the Aphy cloud.

The Aphy Store is the app store for the Apostrophy OS, but as stock, there are very few apps in it. When we got the phone, we installed the sandboxed Google Play services, but thereafter found that we couldn't update them. We couldn't install the K9 Mail email client, either. However, the July update to Apostrophy OS fixed both of these issues. As we found with the Murena phone last year, though, the experience isn't smooth: with multiple app stores installed, checking for updates means going round all of them in turn, and sometimes updates from different sources can conflict.

We found that we couldn't install F-Droid, a widely used FOSS app store for Android - we suspect because it conflicts with the Aphy Store. However, after some experimentation, we discovered we could add the F-Droid repository to the Aphy Store, which made lots more apps suddenly available. We also had no problem installing the independent Aurora Store which gave us access to many of our typical tools. It seemed appropriate to avoid any of the usual metadata-snaffling social network clients, but we found alternative clients such as Friendly for Twitter and Facebook Lite (which these days incorporates Messenger Lite). Messaging clients such as Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram and Slack all worked just like normal.

Since you can't customize the home screen, all additional apps appear on additional screens to the right, and you swipe between them in the usual way. One leftwards swipe of the thumb and the minimalist grayscale Aphy world is swept away, replaced by more typical, colorful, Android - just with a few monochome app icons thrown in.

The combination

With some extra work by the user, Apostrophy can do most of the things that ordinary Android can, but of course, this leaves the problem that if you install all the usual suspects, then this won't be a private, secure phone any more. However, avoiding some apps significantly reduces the usefulness of the device - for the Reg FOSS desk, Google Translate is often a lifeline. For the review, we mainly stuck with alternative services, such as the Syphon client for Matrix chat, and alternative browsers such as Vivaldi and Firefox.

Some glitches remain in this version of Apostrophy OS, too. For instance, it's not possible to add widgets to the extra screens. Some apps add their own: for example, Firefox optionally adds a search widget. However, this appears on its own virtual screen, separate from all app icons, and you can't remove it again except by uninstalling the application.

This vulture's household, among multiple other gadgets, has two budget Xiaomi phones, which are a stark contrast with one another. The older is a Xiaomi A1, which is a classic: it came with the stripped-out, super-clean Android One, with zero non-Google additions, and over the next few years received multiple Android updates, from 7.1 to 9.0. The newer is a Poco F5 is a horrible contrast: what Xiaomi calls HyperOS is just Android, but stuffed with bloatware: alongside almost every stock app is a pointless Xiaomi replacement, some of which regularly nag the user to set them as the defaults - and none of which can be removed.

Compared to this all-too-common mess, Apostrophy is a breath of fresh Alpine air. We think it might appeal to the sort of person who carries a smartphone only reluctantly, who disdains both Google's and Apple's services, and who not only doesn't want social media, games, or videos, but who sees all such things as pointless distractions and is willing to pay to banish them. For a price comparable to subscriptions to a VPN plus a secure email service such as Proton Mail, you get a charmingly minimalist device. Total isolation from digital noise is one click away: hit the dedicated button, and nobody can contact you. But, if you need to be on email and available via multiple proprietary messaging systems - as most of us sadly do - then it can do that.

It's expensive, but perhaps customers who are somewhat secretive and paranoid will pay for that. (Or, more saliently, their companies will.) It is not remotely competitive with a budget Android phone and all the colorful shiny freeware you get in return for selling your personal data. It's a polar opposite to a bling-encrusted, Web3-infested Vertu "luxury" phone. It puts us more in mind of something restrainedly stylish (and reassuringly expensive) like a Bang & Olufsen stereo.  

You will have to put some extra work in to connect it up, and put up with an OS that still has some rough edges and feels unfinished in places. Being so unplugged from the Google infrastructure did leave us feeling that the device was limited, but that can be a bonus - ask an OpenBSD user. We really liked the monochrome UI, and thought it was a shame that it wasn't carried through the whole OS by default. (You can set this manually if you want, which some claim makes phones less distracting.)

This vulture finds himself somewhat torn on the MC02. This is a smartphone for people who'd rather not have a smartphone at all, but must - and who are happy to pay extra for much more privacy than most offer.

There are some comparable devices out there. Its closest rival is probably the Puri.sm Librem 5, but the MC02 is better-specified, and has a more mainstream OS, meaning more apps and friendlier for non-techies. The Fairphone 5 is the same price and more repairable, but lacks a headphone socket or the battery life. The Furi Labs FLX1 is cheaper and has a more FOSS-friendly OS.

Being a price-sensitive buyer with little use for secrecy, encryption and so on, I am not in the target audience. On the other hand, I definitely see the appeal: I don't game, don't watch videos or listen to podcasts, and don't use streaming media, but I was an early adopter of smartphones and am probably rather more wedded to them than is entirely healthy. A big, solid, low-but-decent-spec phone with little in the way of shiny, much reduced digital distraction, but an extra-large battery and a headphone socket definitely does make sense. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/05/mc02_swiss_private_phone/