Earlier last month Michał Kiciński, the co-founder of CD Projekt Red, introduced a phone designed to help you relax and disconnect called Mudita Pure. It takes a very different direction from modern smartphones and it’s arguably more apt to call it the anti-phone as it’s not connected to the Internet and it even has a physical switch that disables your cell connection.
We caught up with Kiciński to find out why his phone breaks away the always-connected mentality of our world today. Kiciński started by talking about how the idea for the phone came to him while he was skiing in the Italian mountains of Livigno.
“I was watching quite a lot of YouTube after skiing and—I found out it depends on which hand I keep the iPhone 3GS—in this hand, I feel like uncomfortable sensations, it’s like a physical pain,” Kiciński said
“The iPhone 3GS was my first smartphone after sticking to feature phones for a long time,” he continued. “I started digging, what could be the potential reason for that. So, it led me to the SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) level and led me to try many different phones, which I found some of them caused this more, some of them then caused less. iPhones were the worst ones.”
After that experience, Kiciński investigated the effects that cell phone radiation can have on the human body from its ability to heal to its effects on pregnancies. But it wouldn’t be until years later that Kiciński started working on a device that produces as little of this radiation as possible.
“There was a program sponsored by European Union,” Kiciński recalled. “The budget was $1 million to find out if it was possible to make the phone with good coverage and a strong signal, but at the same time a very low SAR—which was all very contradictory.
“So, we started work on this and the program ended two years late,” he said. “We had a prototype when it ended and once it was finished it was like ‘Okay, what’s next?’”
Mudita Pure could have ended right there and then, but Kiciński and his team decided to go through with the complex task of bringing the device to production.
Going Old-School
From the outside, the Mudita Pure looks like an old-school candy bar phone from the 90’s and oughts—and it basically is.
There is no touchscreen, and instead you only get a small E-Ink display for a screen with a physical number pad with four-way directional buttons and soft buttons. But the Mudita Pure’s most important and unique control is the slider on the side.
This little slider allows users to manually toggle between being fully-connected, SMS-only mode, or a fully-disconnected flight mode—except you can’t turn back on Wi-Fi (which it doesn’t have anyway) or Bluetooth.
Kiciński told me the ideal way to use their device is to “get connected to the network from time to time and download the SMSs and then disconnect. So if you’re doing some creative task and you don’t want anyone to disturb you but you still want to receive some messages from time to time, then you can get it and you decide if you would like to reply or call back.”
Another thing that makes this phone stand out is its white E-Ink display.
“Because the phone casing is monochromatic of course, we’d rather have the whole color palette to also be black and white,” Kiciński said. He went onto explain they chose a very modern E-Ink display that was high-resolution and featured a quick response time.
“We developed our own operating system to optimize for the E-Ink screen,” he continued. “And we believe that we’ll achieve quite satisfying level of the response time that will work quite fast.”
The screen on the prototype Kiciński showed to me on a video call wasn’t perfectly blended to the rest of the phone as the renders might depict. However, Kiciński assures us that they are doing extensive work with the casing producers to color match the screen to the rest of the phone.
The phone is loaded with a very light, very small operating system based on FreeRTOS, which allows you to navigate through a small selection of apps including notes, calendar, an alarm clock, and music player.
That’s pretty spare compared to the smartphone in your pocket that probably has at least a couple of dozen apps on it. However, Kiciński told me they practically built the OS from scratch, so they can evolve the code in any way they like.
“The two most requested features from the Kickstarter campaign feedback were GPS and some kind of communicator, like WhatsApp or something like that,” Kiciński alluded. “And the interesting thing that we have GPS already on the board, but we didn’t have until now, we didn’t plan to use it. Right now, we’re doing some research and development work on adding an antenna. We’ll know if we can add GPS after the Kickstarter campaign.”
“It won’t be Google Maps and we still need to evaluate to which extent we can use this GPS,” he continued. “Obviously we have lots of limitations not only in terms of the processing power but the small, black and white screen, but we have some ideas. Within one or two months we’ll announce something regarding that.”
As for a communicator app, Kiciński’s team is also evaluating how to include one as well.
“WhatsApp is something we don’t want to add, it’s too much like Facebook right now. We’d rather think about the Signal, which is open-source. It will still take up to two months of research and development to check whether we can add it to the operating system. So, we might do that.”
“We have lots of requests from countries where the data plans are much cheaper than the calls and texts, so they prefer to send text through some kind of messaging system and not through the official operators. Even though adding it could be quite simple, we want to keep this pure approach to the device.”
The Minimally Connected Network
The Pure phone isn’t the only one Mudita plans to release. Kiciński also brought up that his company is working on another touch-based device with a bigger screen.
“We are thinking about having a [operating] system which we can improve and evolve for the other devices,” Kiciński said. “For Mudita Pure, we used a simplified version of the operating system, and for touch-based phone and alarm clock, we’ll use an extended version of the same operating system.”
The other device Kiciński spoke of was the Mudita Bell, a smart alarm clock that will have some form of a sensor system.
“We’re still deciding what kind of sensors we would like to include,” Kiciński said. “We did quite a bit of scientific research about what’s needed—what would actually help us sleep better and tell us the best conditions for sleeping.”
“One of the latest finds we had is the carbon-dioxide and oxygen level in the bedroom. There is extensive scientific work behind how the level of oxygen influences the quality of sleep and the depth of the sleep you have. But the sensors might make the cost of production so high that the device has to be quite expensive, around probably $200.”
“Maybe we’ll make two versions of the device, one which is like a simple alarm clock, and the other one which is equipped with all the sensors,” he said. “Everyone is not willing to have those sensors in their homes. So, we still haven’t made this decision.”
Surprisingly Kiciński isn’t interested in launching yet another connected system of smart home devices.
“We’d rather not follow the trend of connecting devices and building an ecosystem,” he said. “We’d prefer to build the single devices which don’t have to be connected. Very simple and reliable. This is our philosophy.”
That said, Kiciński wants the devices to be updateable to a certain extent. To that end, there will be a desktop PC application that will help users manage their devices by doing things like uploading new ringtones or changing some advanced set-up options.
“We prefer to keep it very simple.” Kiciński ended.
Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
