The Ikko MindOne Pro is delightfully small. And that’s about the nicest thing you can say about it.
It’s a $499 phone from a Shenzhen audio company that usually makes earbuds. The screen is square. The camera flips up for selfies and doubles as a kickstand. There’s a keyboard case with a headphone jack. On paper, it sounds interesting. In practice? It’s a miss.
The phone runs hot. During initial setup it got noticeably warmer than anything else in its class. A week later it settled down, but it still doesn’t take much to heat it up again.
Battery life is poor. Watching it drop from mid-90s to the 60s in an hour and a half — just scrolling reels, Google Maps, and music over Wi-Fi — doesn’t inspire confidence.
The camera is bad. Daylight shots are okay. Indoors, colors go green. The square screen crops into vertical videos and websites. The onscreen keyboard takes up more than half the display. You can toggle a vertical aspect ratio with black bars, but then you’re working with an even smaller display.
The keyboard case is more fiddly than just typing on glass. The AI launcher offers chatbot access to various LLMs, but it tripped up on basic questions and responded in Spanish for no obvious reason.
The Verge’s Allison Johnson tried to love it. She used a minimalist launcher. She tried treating it like a dumb phone. She put the keyboard case on. She took it off. Nothing clicked.
Maybe the real lesson here: what the world actually needs is a small, rectangular phone with modern specs and a battery that lasts the day. The iPhone Mini with USB-C, basically. The MindOne Pro isn’t that phone.
