Right. Like, why would anyone pay a subscription for that?
Edit: I think I get it now:
Those who buy the MC02 get a year for free, after which they’ll pay around $20/€15/£13 each month (discounted if paid annually) to access a handful of services, including email, a VPN (dubbed “Digital Nomad”), online synchronization for calendar and contacts, secure storage on Punkt’s own Swiss servers and the express promise that there will be no ads or third-party crawlers.
So you can access cloud services without being tied to Google, I suppose. Still, the value proposition is questionable.
And even that advantage can be minimized by getting any bundle of privacy products, like Proton which offer all of those (Mail, VPN, Drive, Calendar) or even with your self-hosted VPS (Some VPS seller even allow you to prepare it with Nextcloud and a VPN relay for near no extra paiement).
I see the "pay once to one company", but you also need to trust them entirely, for EVERYTHING.
Also, there's already plenty of companies doing such thing (regardless of how practical/private/secure they are)
personally, i've got more important shit going on that what phone people are using. in the case of this phone, it looks like any other number of Android phones with a custom theme.
i'm assuming it's more than that, but it still looks a bit silly. you can be minimalist and still appreciate things like color.
Might be more secure since it's based on GrapheneOS.
If they didn't mess anything up (security and privacy wise) in their deriviative OS, then I would feel comfortable recommending this to non-tech savvy people who care about their privacy.
Edit: Also with those specs and that battery without Google Play Services, this phone might last me a week on a single charge.