This is one of the more bizarre mobile phones I’ve owned. It’s made by a company who specialize in rugged phones and is really designed for people in lines of work where having to use a touch screen wouldn’t be ideal.
However this phone is more than what it first appears. It does have a touch screen, a capacitive glass screen in fact. It also has probably the loudest speaker I’ve ever heard of a phone and a very bright flashlight. It’s unsung party trick though, is that it runs Android.
This means that while it doesn’t have the play store or any Google services inbuilt you can install Android applications on it in the form of .APK files. In theory as long as the app doesn’t have any requirements like safetynet and GMS then you can run it (banking etc is unlikely to work).
It’s not an easy device to work with, partly due to it being a form factor that android was never designed to work with, and partly because this is not a normal implementation of Android. However with a bit of technological knowhow it is possible to make yourself a smartphone/dumbphone hybrid.
I spent a lot more time tinkering with this device than I actually spent using it. Once developer mode was on and USB debugging was enabled I could do a lot with this device. I spent quite a long time configuring the T9 keyboard as by default it doesn’t have predictive text. Eventually I had something that was a semi smartphone with enough friction in it’s use that you wouldn’t want to spend too long on it.
In the end this device was a bit too “out there” even for me. For one it’s big. It takes up a lot more room in your pocket than an average smartphone, it’s heavy too. Mainly though I was actually embarrassed to pull this out in public. It draws attention and generally not the good kind. I prefer to be a bit more subtle. This was resold online where it went to a farmer, where I’m sure it will have it’s ruggedness put to the test daily!
Leave a Reply