Punkt MC02 Review: Privacy Potential In A Phone That's Not Great

Security and privacy are two concepts that have undergone quite a renovation over the past few years. Apple in particular started banging the privacy war drum years ago. The fact of the matter is, your smartphone is your life in a box. It has everything — your photos, your communications, your calendar — the only things that aren't in your phone are food, water, and air. Only in the past few years have phone makers started to catch on to the idea that, maybe, privacy should be a priority.

Google in particular is quite the perpetrator here. Google's services are so tied to each other, that it's hard to see where your data stops and Google's starts. Google has started to anonymize your data, so it's harder to tell who is who, but it's no secret that if you're tied into Google's ecosystem, the company knows a lot about you.

But the cost of all that is privacy on a fundamental level. Companies and journalists have repeatedly shown how "anonymized data" isn't very anonymized. It doesn't take much to piece together who is who when there is so much data available to private and public citizens alike.

Punkt — and by extension its operating system Apostrophy — thinks it has the answer. How do you get ultimate privacy while continuing to use all the apps you know and love? The answer is the MC02, Punkt's first smartphone which runs on Apostrophy, a system which is based on GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused fork of AOSP. I was curious as to how these companies, seemingly intertwined, could make privacy the focus of a consumer product. I've been using a Punkt MC02 review sample provided by Punkt for just over a week, and this is my full review.

Apostrophy enables this by making side-loading the Google Play store easy. Go into the Apostrphy app "GMS Wizard" and it will download and install in just a few steps. Just like that, you can access all of your apps, though you will have to install them manually, which can be laborious. Add to that, if you're reading this, you probably already have either a Google account or an iOS account, and you most likely successfully live your life through it. 

So maybe you're looking to get away from all that and reclaim your data. Just remember what that entails. We're not just talking about email and calendar. We're talking about all the services you use your Google or Apple account to log into. We're talking about dozens of apps that use that form of sign-in.

Of course, once you side-load the Google Play store, you can also sign into your Google account and download the Gmail app, but from this moment on, you need to make a choice — and you've probably already made that choice since you are holding a Punkt phone — so it's time to set up an automatic forward and start migrating your life into your Apostrophy account. This is potentially a weeks- or months-long commitment. But maybe you're all in on privacy and ready to make a change.

All that being said, the software gets some things right. When you long tap on an app in the sandboxed Google Play area, you can open what's called the "Ledger." This is an area where Apostrophy might be onto something. The Ledger tracks your carbon usage and your data privacy through two large friendly dials that you can adjust.

"Carbon reduction" has three levels and in this case is a woke way of saying "battery life police." Put simply, you can tell the phone to aggressively kill any app if it sits in the background, eating your data and battery life, let it run whenever it's launched, or sit "optimized" in between. Turning the Carbon reduction knob all the way to three gives you the most battery life and the most aggressive prohibitions against background data usage.

Meanwhile, the "Data Privacy" knob does the same thing, but with five levels of how permissions are managed. This is one area where Google could take a page from Apostrophy. It makes battery usage, permissions, and data use user-friendly and easy to understand.

Of course, this area is also a tad buggy. If you turn the phone to landscape, you get only the data privacy knob and you can't see anything else in the Ledger until you turn the phone back upright. Two steps forward, one step back.

Meanwhile, the cameras on the phone are laughably bad. I'm on record for saying that it's hard to buy a phone today with a bad camera as long as your lighting is good. I stand corrected.

The phone has a 64-megapixel camera but is the very embodiment of the sentiment that megapixels don't matter. This camera is unusable in any circumstance. When you snap a photo of a subject, it looks terrible on the phone's screen and when you move it to your computer, it's worse. When you crop into 100%, it's so bad it should be on the no-fly list.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Above, you'll find the same photo displayed twice. On the left is the photo as it appears on the phone screen. On the right, is the photo cropped into 100%. Notice how it looks like a watercolor painting? That's with the main sensor at 1x zoom. That is not supposed to happen.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

For comparison, here's a side-by-side shot with a similar photo I took with the ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro — a phone which, by the way, I said has a camera that "lacks polish" and is "social media good." The Punkt phone isn't even that. 

I haven't even mentioned that the Ultrawide camera is a separate mode in the camera software. In order to access this device's ultrawide lens, you first have to tap More, and then Wide. In addition, this phone is absolutely unable to focus on anything more than six feet away in low light. Want proof?

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Note to future phone makers: If cameras are this low a priority, just don't include them in the first place. Tablets shouldn't be able to take better photos than a smartphone at any price.