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Credit: Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
- The Punkt MC02 phone is now available for purchase at a price of $749.
- It features middling hardware but puts a strong focus on data privacy.
- The device is now available in Europe and North America.
You may not have heard of Punkt, but of all the usual smartphone brands on the MWC 2024 show floor, it’s the only one doing things differently. The Punkt MC02 is a new privacy-focused phone you can now purchase in Europe and North America. First introduced in November 2023, the Punkt phone is only now starting to ship to its first set of customers — a niche group of smartphone users who value choice and want complete control over the data their handsets put out in the world.
The Punkt MC02 runs on an operating system called Apostrophy. It’s based on Graphene OS, another privacy-conscious operating software you might have heard about. Apostrophy builds upon the foundation of Graphene OS and adds its own secure apps to the phone, such as contacts, storage, email, files, tasks, and more. It also offers a Digital Nomad VPN app to protect browsing data.
A Carbon and Data Ledger lets you control what and how much data individual apps can share. So you can allow or block an app from sharing your personal data, hardware peripherals (mic, camera, etc), and network permissions depending on your use case.
The data from all the Apostrophy apps is stored in servers located in Switzerland, no matter where you use the phone. The EU is famous for its strict data protection laws, and that’s why the company insists on banking data on Swiss servers.
That said, Punkt users also have an option of downloading the Google Play Store and all the apps that come with it. The company says users can do this at their own risk, and the phone issues a privacy warning when you install the Play Store for the first time. By default, it simply includes an installer for the Play Store and doesn’t have any of the usual Google apps onboarded to begin with.
Punkt MC02 specs and price
Credit: Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
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