The Punkt phone, launched at the London design festival, lets you call and text. It also has nice buttons and is easy to hold. And that’s about it.

Smartphone backlash: the mobile that gives you your life back

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2024-11-10 10:30:04

The Punkt phone, launched at the London design festival, lets you call and text. It also has nice buttons and is easy to hold. And that’s about it. Would you pay £229 for it?

“I think the ‘always on’ life is probably even worse than having a poor diet,” says Petter Neby, founder of Swiss consumer electronics company Punkt. “Every day we are consuming more trash, and becoming more detached from real life and the ability to deal with situations head-on. Just look around, it’s a disaster – and the sociological issue of our times.”

Neby is an ebullient man on a mission, an entrepreneur who wants us to rediscover the lost art of conversation and the spontaneous beauty of chance encounters. That’s why his company, founded in 2008, makes sleek and easy-to-use devices that do one thing very well, but nothing more, allowing you to focus on “having a life and living”, as he likes to say – something technology often derails.Punkt’s latest product, the MP 01, is a back-to-basics mobile phone. Launched at the London design festival, and designed by the British industrial designer Jasper Morrison, Punkt’s artistic director, the phone is a pared-down black affair with slightly raised, rounded buttons and a gently angled shape that makes it easy to hold.But it’s the MP 01’s functional simplicity that sets it apart from today’s smartphones. Users can make and receive calls and texts, check a calendar for dates, store 3,000 contacts in the address book and leave themselves reminder notes on the home screen. And that’s it. Unlike the so-called brick or flip phones of yore, however, it can import phone contacts from a computer via USB cable and can be used with the same phone number as your smartphone, when twinned with your SIM card.

Morrison and Neby believe the tide is turning against intrusive technology that endlessly demands your attention. “I think we are more aware than before of feeling stupid looking at our screens,” says Morrison. “And the objects themselves have become so big that they are just not that handy for making calls any more. I think there is a niche. A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have said that, but it’s gone our way since we started designing it.”