my iphone kept its job and lost its night shift

Last march I caught myself on the wikipedia page for the great molasses flood of 1919 at 12:40 in the morning. I was not enjoying it. I had not chosen it. I opened my phone to set an alarm, and forty minutes later I knew everything about a tank of syrup that exploded in boston and nothing about why I was still awake.

That was the last night my phone slept next to me.

the honest bit, sale and all

First, a small miracle to report: I caught a sale. Me. The person who paid full price for a hair styler in prussian blue. The Boox Palma 2, a phone-shaped e-ink reader that runs actual Android apps, was marked down to $269.99 on Boox's own store, and for once my impulse and a discount arrived in the same week.

The feelings cost was bigger than the money cost, honestly. The first week I flinched a lot, and I'll explain exactly why in a second, because nobody warned me and I would like to be the one who warns you.

what it is, in the order i explain it to friends

It is exactly phone-shaped and exactly not a phone. A 6.13 inch e-ink screen, about 170 grams, fits one hand, lives in the same pocket as a phone. It has no SIM slot on mine, no calls, no camera worth using, and no feed. My iphone kept every job that needs a good camera or a map or my mom. Everything with a scroll moved here.

The refresh flash nobody warns you about. Every few page turns or app switches, the whole screen blinks black for one beat, like a camera flash behind a sheet, then redraws. That flash is how e-ink erases the gray ghost of the last page. Week one, it jump-scared me so reliably I considered a sponsorship from my own adrenal glands. Week three, it became furniture noise, like the radiator. You can stretch how often it fires in the settings, and I set mine to breathe every few turns and learned to read through the soft gray leftovers in between.

A slow phone is the feature, and I need you to hear me out. The reviews were right that the chip is old. The Verge benched it like a solid midrange phone from 2019, and apps open at the speed of a librarian walking to the back shelf. Instagram on this screen is a miserable, stuttering, grayscale experience.

That is the sales pitch.

Nothing pleasurable to scroll is pleasant to scroll on here, so the feed apps wither on their own, no willpower required, which is great because I had none to spare at midnight. Meanwhile the stuff I actually want runs beautifully: kindle, libby, instapaper, a podcast app, one notes app. The text sits at 300ppi like it was printed this morning.

The battery is measured in days, not bedtimes. I get four to five days per charge, which is a number my phone has never said to me even once in its life. It charges over usb-c with everything else on my desk. At 11pm mine is usually sitting above fifty percent, smug about it.

The buttons are half the personality. Real page-turn buttons on the edge, which sounds like nothing and is everything when your hands are under a blanket. The power button has a fingerprint reader in it, and it is finicky in the specific way a cat is finicky, so about one unlock in five it thinks about it first. Fine. I have nowhere urgent to be at 11pm, that's the entire arrangement.

The catches, said plainly, with the budget tiers. The plastic body feels flimsy for the money, and there's a hollow gap under the glass that my thumb notices. The 16MP camera scans a recipe card fine and takes photos like a flip phone having a bad day. Future Android updates are a shrug from this company, they're better at launching new devices than feeding old ones. And the lineup moved around me: the original Palma is now $199.99, the color 5G Palma 2 Pro is $399.99, there's a new Palma 3 at $339.99, and the Palma 2 I bought sits in the middle at $269.99 on sale, $299.99 list. I bought the middle one on purpose, for the boring reason that it does the one job I need at the price I can defend.

the tangent: my nightstand finally matches my candles 🕯️

Here is the part I did not expect as a person whose entire brand is warm light. The Palma's frontlight slides from cold white down to this deep amber, and at thirty percent on the lowest setting, next to a lit candle the size of a thumb, the whole nightstand looks like a painting of a cozy evening. Cream cover, paper-colored screen, brass candle, one dog per pillow. Mochi on my feet, Noodle holding down the other pillow like it owes her rent.

The matcha kindle from my earlier post is still the bath book, that's its permanent job. The Palma is the pocket one, the 11pm one, the one that rides in my tote next to the planner I am pretending I will use. Two e-ink devices is, I admit, a ridiculous amount of e-ink for one 500 square foot apartment.

I know. But my screen time report dropped by about two hours a day, and when I went looking for where those hours went, I found forty finished pages of a novel and one very rested pair of eyes, and oh my god, apparently this is what people mean by "rest."

the soft landing

I keep meaning to cancel the reading app trial I started on it, and every time I open the settings to do it I get two chapters in instead, so

The truest thing: this is the first piece of tech I own that gets better the less I look at it, and my nights feel longer in the way the kindle made them feel, like someone quietly handed me the hour back that the molasses flood took.

go put your phone in the kitchen, it'll be fine

ava