I’d argue that the confounding factor, in this case, is that once you step into the realm of mass production; ‘cheap’ isn’t always crap; and short-run bespoke stuff can have to be eyewateringly expensive to even work, much less be ‘amazing-quality’. (It’s the “first unit off the line costs $500 million, second costs $50” model vs. something like handmade jewelry where design definitely costs; but materials and labor keep it expensive no matter how many you stamp out)
There are low-end phones that are genuinely worthless crap; or midrange phones that spend enough time trying to play high-end on a budget that they are nearly unusable; but there are also low-end phones as in “Years of market research, design, testing-to-failure, and refinement”. Nokia’s developing-world line, say, isn’t merely ‘cheap’, it’s ‘cheap; and designed to appeal to someone who can’t just buy another one if this one dies’. Yes, it’s plastic(though so is this, just with a classier paint job; it might be camera colored but it isn’t built like a camera); but it’s been tested against water and dust ingress, number of keypresses to failure, etc, etc.
Aside from studiously avoiding using any of the colors the LCD is capable of(though not actually going with a lower-power greyscale LCD, presumably for cost/volume reasons), there isn’t actually much ‘minimalist’ here that a designed-for-developing-world model doesn’t have, along with the virtues of low cost mass production(and typically a robust secondary market in replacement batteries and such, because the target audience can’t afford to just throw broken stuff away).
I think that that is what sort of irks me about this. It looks the part of ‘minimalist’ to the extreme; but is up against markedly cheaper competitors that are what someone who stamps out multiple millions of handsets a year knows about ‘minimal’; is arguably more style than substance in several respects(battery is ‘forgettable’ in its lifespan; can you get a replacement? It has a ‘camera’ finish; but over boring plastic, not the finely crafted metal people associate with that, it has a greyscale UI running on a stock color LCD, presumably because volume, a 2G modem is going to ensure shrinking service areas over the life of the device; and the tech specs are silent on keypad lifespan, moisture/dust ingress resistance, etc.)
There’s a sort of cargo-cult-minimal about it. It sure looks like what ‘minimalist’ is supposed to mean; but it only follows through a modest amount of the time. I think that it would be more appealing if it were either ‘minimalist’ as in ‘field tested mostly likely to survive rural Ghana at a price rural Ghana can afford’ or as in ‘hell yeah this is a toy for rich geeks; but just try to pretend that the gorgeously machined case, beautifully tactile keypad, and any-light transreflective screen aren’t sexy as hell’. As it is, it’s something like the ‘tacticool’ of minimalism.
