In a backlash to the incessant wave of emails, text and Instagram posts, Punkt. is offering a way of refocusing our lives, with products that do what it says on the tin – an alarm clock that wakes you up, and a phone that just makes phone calls. Radical...
There’s something about Punkt. phones. Put one on the table in a meeting or at a café and you’ll invariably get one of two reactions: (a) Someone will pick it up, look intrigued at the sleek, minimalist Jasper Morrison design and ask, ‘Ooh, what’s this?’ Or (b) You’ll get the nod. A subtle, knowing, approving look that acknowledges you as a member of an exclusive, enlightened club.

The club that Punkt. represents is a growing – and increasingly influential – one. It posits that the incessant march of digital progress has abandoned some fundamental touch points along the way. High-profile thinkers in the tech resistance – including Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age), Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World) and Jaron Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget) preach that our relationship with technology is becoming worryingly one-sided. (All, incidentally, feature prominently in Punkt.’s distinctly non-virtual library of recommended books.*)

From our sleep patterns to our relationships, these wise heads argue, we are letting technology dictate the way we
live our lives. There is a growing feeling that the internet is doing the opposite of what it promised – it isn’t so much a liberating and democratising force for good as a digital despot, enslaving and alienating us. Paradoxically, social media has become anti-social; the process of being constantly connected, 24/7, has left us all disconnected.
The fear of being swallowed by an avalanche of messages then means your concentration is taken up by often mundane and trivial tasks. Questions that require deeper thought before replying tend to get lost in this flood of instant messaging – you park it to allow proper time to think about it… and then never find the time to respond.

The result is a generation engaged in what Pulitzer prize-nominated writer Nicholas Carr describes as ‘shallow thought’ (his book, The Shallows, is listed in Punkt.’s ‘library’); never allowing themselves the luxury of time and reflection. Which is where Punkt. comes in.

Founded by Norwegian entrepreneur Petter Neby, in 2008, ‘to offer a viable alternative for those feeling overwhelmed by the advanced technologies that have pervaded modern lifestyles’, Punkt. isn’t simply about a rejection of online lifestyles or a ‘digital detox’ – but rather ‘using technology to help us adopt good habits for less distracted lives’. Not anti-tech then, but ensuring tech is kept in its place – to serve our needs and make our lives easier.

Through a few core products: the AC01 alarm clock; MP01 mobile phone and recently-launched MP02, each designed to simplify their principal function (the phone is concentrated on phone calls and texts), Neby has become the catalyst behind a beautifully-designed, quiet revolution.


Despite the punk rock connotations (which of course they are more than happy to exploit), the name actually derives from the Germanic word for point/full stop/ period. Hence the full stop at the end of the brand name: denoting both an ending and the start of something new.

‘The only thing I wanted to do was make an alarm clock! I had no ambitions to do anything else,’ laughs Neby, when we meet in the company office in Lugano (as good a setting as any to highlight the importance of taking our faces out of our phones and admiring the world around us). ‘And Jasper started saying, “Do you have any idea what it takes to create a brand?”’

Central to the Punkt. philosophy is the idea of ‘Digital Minimalism’ – a term coined by the author and analogue evangelist Cal Newport, which he describes as ‘the art of knowing how much is just enough’. When applied to our use of personal technology, it becomes the key to living a focused life among the constant background noise of the digital world: ‘a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions’.

Since the AC01 was inspired by the idea that an alarm clock was the only technology you should have in your bedroom, it was a natural progression to start investigating the harm that we are doing to ourselves by being constantly connected to our smartphones.

‘You listen to your doctor when you’re sick, right? And you take your medicine. But once you get healthy again, you don’t complete the prescription of pills that you were given,’ says Neby.
 ‘Well, any doctor will tell you there’s no space for your smartphone in your room. Even if it’s turned off, it still has an influence over you, tremendously. Because we relate to objects. When it is on your bedside table, it has an influence over you.’‘Any doctor will tell you
there’s no space for your
smartphone in your
bedroom. Even if it’s
turned off, it still has an
influence over you’Current statistics suggest that 80 per cent of smartphone users check their phones immediately upon waking in the morning. Most of us will recognise that urge to constantly check our devices for messages. ‘We are still fascinated by technology,’ says Neby. ‘This idea that you have a magician in your pocket – there’s no way your head can understand what’s going on. That’s why the “next app” culture can still work – you can swap faces or whatever stupid thing it is - but once that [fascination] starts to not happen is when you begin to ask, “What is this really all about?” And that’s when you make that shift.’
That shift, as Neby describes it, is the slow realisation that the technology nagging us on our bedside table is delivering the exact opposite of the promise. Where is the freedom it is supposed to give us?

‘Exactly. That’s what the technology is supposed to do,’ says Neby, before stressing his vision for the brand. ‘There’s nothing here about anti-technology. I live in Florence and I have colleagues – one in London, one in Turin, one in Lugano – and thanks to technology it’s possible for us all to be together. And that’s when you are using it as a tool, purposefully. But not when it starts to demand from you…’

There is a famous clip of David Bowie being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for the BBC’s Newsnight in 1999 that went viral. During their conversation about the possibilities of the rapidly evolving digital world, Bowie reacts to Paxman’s dismissive remark that the internet is merely a tool or ‘a different delivery system’.

‘I don’t agree,’ he says to a frowning Paxman. ‘We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment – the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.’ ‘I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg,’ he adds. ‘What the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.’
This is exactly where Punkt. positions itself: straddling the line, acting as gatekeeper between ‘Good Internet’ and ‘Bad Internet’. With some smart copywriting (‘Make the switch’; ‘Always on, but never here’; ‘Get lost’), the brand tackles the problems inherent in its industry, making the case that being constantly online is bad for the soul, while we use our phones less and less for the very function they were invented to fulfil. (‘Phone calls are usually more efficient – and always more personal’ states one Punkt. ad campaign slogan).

(Incidentally, even the Punkt. copywriter has the work/life balance thing sussed. ‘He lives in the countryside in Somerset,’ says brand manager Marcia Caines, when we meet in Lugano. ‘He’s hardly ever online, so you can only talk to him at certain times, but you know when he sends the copy it will be perfect.’)

This is the embodiment of another Punkt. mantra: ‘The power of focus’. One solution that Caines has adopted is a partial digital detox: regulating when you read and answer emails or take Zoom calls. The results, she says, have been noticeable. ‘By just taking a Friday afternoon off from replying to emails, I can’t tell you how much more I get done. It’s so stupid. It seems like you’re working less, but you’re actually achieving more. I can concentrate more. It sounds ridiculous… because it’s half a day! But I found I hit 90 per cent of my deadlines from doing that.’
But, in an age of constant digital distraction, where one’s attention is continuously held by ‘surface’ details, our ability to dive deep – to focus and to really think – is minimised. (Hence another of their pithy slogans: ‘Multitasking is a myth’. ‘There’s this idea that it’s a competition, claiming that you’re constantly busy,’ adds Neby. ‘It’s OK not to be busy!’)

‘What suffers most in the digital age is relationships,’ continues Caines. ‘Whether that’s work relationships or personal relationships or friendships: those are what
suffer most, because of a lack of attention.’

In his bestselling book, published in February 2019, Newport proposes ‘rethinking [our] relationship to social
media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with [our] inner selves through regular periods of solitude.’ He recommends a 30-day ‘digital de-clutter process’ – learning to live without our tech addiction, retraining our muscle memory and our habits and so wean ourselves off the constant urge to check and reply, tweet and share. ‘The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you,’ he explains. Thus we can gradually learn to replace
FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), with JOMO – the Joy Of Missing Out.

For a techpreneur like Neby, this is music to his ears. ‘It’s a solution to let people keep their smartphones and their sanity,’ he says, ‘using technology with more intention and purpose.’ His approach seems much more sustainable than the popular digital detoxes.
This liberating sense of downgrading rather begs the question: why not just buy a burner phone for £20? The obvious question deserves the obvious answer: you need to invest in this for it to work.

But what do you get for your money besides what is essentially Blackberry technology – albeit one in a beautifully designed package? Well, for a start, that’s not all it is – the fact it works as a tethering device means you can use it to create a hotspot to get online on your laptop or – whisper it – alternate smartphone. Which is a point Neby is keen to stress – he’s not pushing an either/or option. Having spent a decent amount of time living with one myself, this becomes apparent. The reality is that modern life makes it very difficult to get by without being able to access countless necessities of our joined-up lifestyles, from banking apps to podcasts.
‘What suffers most
in the digital age is
relationships - work or
personal, those are what
suffer most, because
of a lack of attention’What Punkt. makes you consider is how much of a necessity these really are – it forces your online life to be a conscious decision. What I found myself doing – again something Neby actively promotes – was leaving the house with a Punkt. phone and a smartphone ‘just in case’. Just by forcing myself to think twice every time I reached for the second option, I learnt to stem my habits. And that’s where Neby is banking on proving the value of his products – the affluent market he is pitching to find time is the greatest luxury of all, and one worth paying for. Besides, the cost of a Punkt. phone (£295 for the MP02) is nothing in comparison to the latest smartphone from Apple (£1,049 for the iPhone 11 Pro anyone?) – but it’s enough to demand commitment to a detox life.

Neby has built his business around that conceit. While the new MP02 can act as a tethering device for other screens, it
shouldn’t be used itself for online screen time. ‘If the main format you use for getting information is your smartphone, that is very limiting,’ he says. ‘You have to scroll through everything. There is a golden ratio for screen size and if the information you need is smaller than what fits within that, then it can be lost.’

This is, he says, not simply a practical issue but also a theoretical and philosophical one. ‘Look at all this fake news – or just news in general: google it first, and [we] will probably look at the first three results only – and that’s [our] truth! Your headline doesn’t tell you the whole story.’

A heads-down perspective on the world has other implications too. ‘People rely on their satnavs, following technology blindly without looking out of the window and using common sense,’ he continues. ‘That’s the thing isn’t it? Common sense! That has become an issue. Increasingly there is no space for people to make a judgment over a situation. We must believe in common sense. There are all these traps in society that you could fall into. It’s become almost automised. These people who think they can solve people’s problems with technology – and yet they don’t understand people!’

The question, he says, has become one of how much are we handing over to technology – and at what point do we want to reclaim some of that space?
‘You have to ask about this revival of crafts,’ he says. ‘Why is that so interesting and fulfilling? It feels worthwhile to make something: it’s tangible. If all make is software, and someone asks, “What does your father do?” “Oh, he sits on the computer!” Whereas my father was a farmer, he drove a tractor. Making something – and the tactility and the process of making it – is more and more important. There’s common sense – and there is etiquette. When you make something, that process cuts you out of everything else, so that you only focus on what you’re doing.

The power of focus – of thinking through the consequences of our actions, of questioning facts – isn’t that exactly what it’s all about? punkt.ch

*Further reading
Punkt. include its own library of recommended reading for anyone who wants to learn more about their ethos. Naturally, it recommends you read them in their physical format rather than via a hand-held device (‘They’re all real books, with pages, cover and a spine…’)

Here are a few highlights:

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the
Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused
Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
How to be Free by Tom Hodgkinson
Irresistible by Adam Alter
The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda
New Dark Age by James Bridle
The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin
The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power
and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington
Super Normal by Naoto Fukasawa
and Jasper Morrison
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social
Media by Jaron Lanier
The World Beyond Your Head
by Matthew Crawford
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier




WORDS MARK HOOPER | PHOTOGRAPH JAMES WHITTY AND SAM WALTON