Sleke Phone Hands-On And First Impressions!

This is the Andres Segovia Show. Hey everyone, it's Andres, and I'm coming at you with another tech video. In this one, I'm going to be going over the Sleek phone. But as you'll notice, this is a Google Pixel. That's because the Sleek phone is a Google Pixel running a customized ROM of Android called Odyssey OS. Now, what is Sleek? Sleek, as they say on their website, makes a smartphone which helps people interact in the real world while eliminating the most distracting parts of their devices. The phone includes communication utility-oriented features and excludes anything meant to pull us away from living our real lives. As I'm going through the first setup screen here, let me explain to you what Odyssey OS is. So this is, again, from the sleek.io website. Odyssey OS is the operating system that runs the phone. Odyssey OS is a modified version of AOSP with a strong foundation in privacy and security features. Odyssey OS is default. deGoogled, with the option to use Micro G to utilize Google Play services, has a custom launcher, and has system-level domain blocking of disallowed websites. More on that later. This is the home screen, which is very minimalistic, very clean, and not much on the screen right out the box other than just a widget at the top explaining some things, a hamburger button that gives you some menu options, and then the app launcher, which at launch doesn't really have much of anything installed here, which is good because we don't want a bunch of bloatware. So there looks to be a system update. So I'm going to let the system update do its thing. And let me talk a little bit more about the inspiration of this Odyssey OS. Right now, back to the website. Sleek says that they call this Odyssey OS because they take inspiration from Odysseus, the hero in the ancient Greek epic poem, The Odyssey. And they go on to recount the story of the siren. So if you know about that, then you know that Odysseus tied himself up to the mast. While he ordered his men to plug their ears with beeswax so they wouldn't hear the sirens. Curiosity got the better of him. That's why Odysseus wanted to hear it, but he wanted to be tied to the mast. So that's what Sleek is going on to explain here, that just like Odysseus' crew who bound him to the mast, they are here to help you resist the sirens of distractions while enabling you to take advantage of the helpful tools that the smartphone enables. Odyssey OS is deliberately limited. Offering only the tools needed for communication and daily utility. There are no games, no web browsing or multimedia apps here. Just features that support you while you engage in real life. So now that the phone's booted back up again, I must say it took about 35 minutes for the software to download and install and ultimately set this thing to restart. That's kind of on par with devices that are running custom ROMs on Pixel. Sometimes these things do take your time and 30 minutes or so is about the average that I've experienced when it comes to installing software updates. So Odyssey OS is based on Android 16 running on this Google Pixel 7. On the website, you can buy a Pixel 8 or a Pixel 9 preloaded with Odyssey OS. So now with this update that I installed, there are more apps that appear here on the launcher. Let me just grant permissions to the Sleek App Store. This is based off Aurora, and that's pretty cool because there's some familiarity for those of us that already know how to use it. You can sign in with your Google account or remain anonymous. What's very interesting here, though, just like Odyssey OS says that there's no multimedia apps and no games, when you go over to the App Store and you want to type in, say, YouTube, if I type in YouTube, it's not going to pull it up. You can pull up YouTube Studio, but you can't pull up YouTube. I couldn't pull up Rumble. Prior to testing this device, I did get to speak to the team behind the sleek phone, and they did explain to me that was intentional. They do have a whitelist and, of course, a blacklist. And when that thing is preloaded, I believe, natively to the OS, I'll be saving those questions for when I bring the team on the program to discuss Odyssey OS, their intentions with the sleek phone, and ultimately, their upcoming project, the Enough phone. But this is a very interesting take in what the phone is trying to do. The philosophy is quite literally trying to dumbify a smartphone to keep you less distracted from the things that don't matter and just keep you focused on communications and for you to go about your daily life. I can get behind that perspective, just that to each their own, you got to know what you're getting into. And this is a project that's been around for about two and a half years that they've been developing with loyal beta testers for the program. So if there wasn't a market for something like this. There wouldn't be much of any backing for it now, would it? Now, you can get Google Play services on here, just like the website says. You can install Micro G and such. It's not Sandbox, so they're going to run natively on the phone. I guess I'd throw that out there, but this is my first impressions of Sleek Phone. It's a very interesting approach to Android. I haven't seen something like this in quite some time, whereas others give you granular controls so you can morph it into this. This one is already out of the box, blocking a bunch of different things to keep you. Focused instead of distracted so I'll be exploring this device from that perspective and to see hey Does this actually work for someone that's constantly needing to be plugged online? Well more on that when I review this device anyway, that's it for this one You got any questions regarding this anything you'd like me to test? Let me know in the comment section down below Remember to like share subscribe stay in a know hit the notification bell so you don't miss notification whenever this goes up And I'll see you on the next one