The Ikko MindOne Pro is delightfully small. It's a phone that immediately catches the eye with its almost-square form factor, a design that feels both nostalgic and futuristic. But as charming as the hardware is, the phone quickly reveals a series of flaws that make it hard to recommend.

I first met the MindOne Pro at CES back in January. It's made by Ikko, a company based in Shenzhen that has mainly produced earbuds and audio accessories until now. The MindOne Pro is the company's take on a small smartphone, or an AI gadget, or… both, I guess. It ships globally and is priced at $499, though it's currently marked down to $429 on the company's website.

Hardware and Design

The phone's square screen is nice in theory — at least until you remember that the mobile web is built for vertical rectangles. The phone's default behavior is to fill the entire screen area, which means cropping into the middle of vertical videos and websites. It's not ideal, and the onscreen keyboard fills up more than half the display area. Thankfully, Ikko includes some controls in the quick settings shade to help mitigate this. There's a toggle for resolution, which fits more content onto the screen, and a toggle to change the display to a vertical aspect ratio with black bars on the sides of the screen. It's helpful for the occasions when you run into text boxes and date pickers that just don't work on the square screen, though it means you're dealing with a smaller display area inside of an already small display.

The camera flips up so you can use it for selfies — you can even open it partway to use as a stand or a kind of PopSocket. There's a Clicks-style keyboard accessory that also adds a magnetic ring and a headphone jack. I tried so hard to like it, but this phone is a miss no matter how you look at it.

Performance and Battery Life

As charming as the hardware is, I noticed some yellow flags right off the bat when it got significantly warm as I was setting it up. Initial setup is always a lot for a phone's processor to chew through, but the MindOne got noticeably hotter on that first day out of the box than most phones I use. A week later it has settled down a bit, though it doesn't take much to warm it up again.

Battery life is also pretty dismal. I watched it drop from the mid 90 percents to the 60s over the course of an hour and a half, and I wasn't doing anything super taxing. Scrolling through reels, surfing around on Google Maps, and streaming some music — all over Wi-Fi — was enough to eat through a third of the phone's battery in less than two hours. That doesn't feel great.

Camera Quality

The bad news just keeps coming. The novel camera design is a good idea, but the camera itself just stinks. Color processing is all over the place. It usually handles daylight okay, but photos taken under dim indoor lighting look too green. The flip-up mechanism is neat but the results are inconsistent.

Software and Usability

Maybe that's the point, though. I can appreciate the MindOne more if I look at it as a minimalist phone or an alternative phone to use on weekends. I like the idea of something like a Light phone that simply doesn't run the mind-numbing apps like Instagram that I can't seem to quit. But sometimes you need an Uber app, so I have trouble with all-in minimalist phones that feel too limited. The MindOne could be an alternative — sure, you can open the Instagram app, but it's such a bad experience maybe you'll do it less. Maybe I lack willpower, but I found myself scrolling Instagram just as often, except having a worse time. The best minimalist phone is a cellular smartwatch, etc. etc.

There's a whole other launcher on the MindOne Pro dedicated to AI apps that I'm not sure I get the point of. It offers a chatbot that allows you to switch between LLMs, as well as a notes app. Ikko being a Chinese company, I wondered how it would handle questions that the Chinese government might not like. I asked it if Hong Kong is part of China; it responded in Spanish for some reason and said that it couldn't help me with my question. It even comes with a global eSIM that you can toggle on — it's free to use with the AI launcher, but you need to pay to use it for messaging and the like. The connection is slow, at least in my neck of the woods in Seattle.

Keyboard Case

I even have a hard time recommending the keyboard case. Again, it seems great in theory. There's a little battery inside and you can flip a switch to have it charge the phone up while you use it. But somehow the keys are more fiddly than just typing with the onscreen keyboard. Maybe I'm just out of practice because I swear I was pretty fast on my Blackberry Curve, but I actually found it to be slower and fussier than virtual keys. The headphone jack is a thoughtful touch, though.

Final Verdict

As charming as the concept is, I think a phone this shape was always going to have a tough time. Fighting to look at webpages and apps built for rectangles through a square-shaped window is just a losing battle. Maybe instead of a square-ish phone what the world really needs is a small, rectangular phone with modern bells and whistles. The MindOne isn't that phone, at least for me. Maybe it is for someone who's easy on the battery and isn't picky about camera quality. The rest of us will just have to keep looking.

Source: The Verge News