This video was sponsored by Skillshare.
This is the Zero 18.
It's the first phone from a Berlin based start-up called Blloc.
It's a minimalist smartphone built to get rid of distractions, and the team behind it decided
to completely reinvent the smartphone interface.
I've spent a few days with two early prototypes, so let's take a look.
This is not just yet another standard Android phone.
The Blloc Zero 18 wants to cure your smartphone addiction, although you wouldn't know that
it's unique from just looking at the device itself.
In fact the notch on the front and the iPhone-like back actually make this a fairly standard
midrange Android phone for 2018.
I like translucent back, but the hardware certainly feels fairly generic.
Makes sense.
Blloc is a small startup, so the hardware is probably off-the-shelf stuff from China.
But as soon as you look at either the space-food inspired packaging, or the company's fancy
website, or as soon as you unlock the screen, you notice that something is different.
This phone and the company behind it is actually rather unique.
There are two modes on the phone that you can switch between, and we will first start
with the less extreme one that the company calls "MNML (minimal) mode".
It's basically just standard Android with a monochrome launcher and a skin applied to it.
If you open apps, they launch in monochrome mode by default, because our monkey brains
are apparently really easily distracted by colors.
A cool trick here is that you can just tap the fingerprint reader to toggle color on
or off anywhere in the system whenever you need it, like when you want to take a photo.
It's pretty nifty, but that's pretty much all there is to MNML mode as it's really only
meant to be used when the other mode gets a little too restrictive.
Because Blloc mode is where the company wants you to spend your time.
This mode has 3 main screens, all in black and white of course, and each one of them
was designed with two goals in mind: to keep distractions in check as much as possible
and to keep you from opening apps as much as possible.
By default, your notifications are shown on the tiles as dots, and if an app annoys you,
you can easily phase it out by hiding its notifications, muting it, or reducing its
brightness because dark stuff apparently attracts your eyes a lot less.
Oh, and you can also lock individual apps from here.
Of course this is a grid of icons so you can just use it to launch your apps if you need,
but the company is slowly building out functionality so you won't have to.
After all, opening apps is usually the first step to a user being sucked into an endless
scrolling time waster.
And uh, pro tip here: binge watching TechAltar videos or scrolling through TechAltar tweets
is definitely not considered a time waster, so just keep watching.
Anyway, as a start, some apps like Spotify let you do basic controls from the tile without opening the app
and I was told that Blloc wants to add similar controls to most common apps in the future too.
The screen on the right is called the tree which wants to be a unified communication hub.
So the system automatically pulls out SMS messages, phone calls, Whatsapp, Telegram,
Messenger and other conversations from the apps and puts them all into this page.
You can then switch between channels like Whatsapp or SMS per contact and have them
all appear in one feed.
All without opening an app and without having to care or remember which service a person uses.
Similar solutions were available on Blackberry, with Blackberry Hub, as well as Windows Phone
in the early days and as far as I know neither of them ever really took off, but
you know Blloc's solution is somewhat different, so maybe this one will be a hit.
And by the way, you might have noticed that even navigation buttons are hidden in the
Blloc UI, as all you do here is swipe either to the right or to the left.
Very minimalistic.
To the left you have the last screen called the root.
Here you are supposed to type in commands and have the phone serve you results.
So you can type "weather Berlin" to get the weather, you can type "news" and select your source
to get the headlines, you can set up an alarm from here by typing in what
you want and so on.
Once again, the idea is to avoid opening apps as much as possible.
Now, all of this software is definitely still a work in progress.
Many of the integrations are pretty buggy, there just aren't enough integrations yet,
and it's unclear if Blloc can keep up with all the changes in the future.
After all, Blloc is hacking these integrations into Android and into Android apps,
so if those change the way they work, these integrations might just break.
I'm interested to see if the company manages to fix everything before they release the
phone in November, but even until then, I like the ideas behind this phone and I just
love how the software looks.
Little details like the awesome boot animation give it a character, a kind of Berlin hipster
design vibe that I really dig.
And if nothing else comes out of it, this phone will at least be a fantastic UI or UX design case study.
Anyway, the rest of the device is pretty much a standard midrange Android experience.
The Helio P23 processor is not too exciting but at least the phone comes with 4 gigs of
RAM and 64 gigs of storage so it feels reasonably snappy.
The screen is not an OLED which is definitely a missed opportunity given how dark the interface
is, but at least the fullHD LCD screen is pretty good.
The 3000 mAh battery is also pretty average in this category, and the camera, well, it's
too early to say given that this is an early prototype, but so far it didn't seem too impressive.
But of course real camera tests will have to wait until we get the final device.
Either way, this phone wasn't built to be the best Android phone.
It was built with a specific goal in mind.
Blloc says your regular smartphones are functional, but too distracting and most specialized phones
like the Light phone are distraction free, but not very functional.
Blloc tries to integrate the best of both worlds by keeping all of the functionality,
but still shielding you from distractions whenever possible.
And if that's what you are looking for, then there aren't many alternatives on the market right now.
And at 359 Euros, also including a full year of insurance, I think it's pretty reasonably priced.
I actually got to hang out with the Blloc team quite a lot for this video and I always
find it inspiring when just a handful of people have the necessary skills to build
something cool out of nothing.
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to learn the necessary skills.
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There are tons of really great courses like this one so if you want
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