Murena 2 smartphone review

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We managed to get by for a few months, and we are grateful for that Murena and their staff, the new smartphone Murena 2 developed around the /e/OS operating system. This will be a review dedicated to this mobile phone and will be in the style of iodé operating system review.

Let's start by saying that the smartphone is currently on pre-sale through the Indiegogo site and if you are interested you should still have time to purchase it with the 10% discount compared to the price at which it will normally be sold: €449 against the official price of the 541$.

Murena is the name of the smartphone produced and created by the developers of the /e/OS operating system (which we talked about here) and is therefore a smartphone degoogled and certainly a good alternative to consider mainly for those who do not have the desire, time or think they are not able to autonomously implement an operating system like LineageOS or GrapheneOS.

Some photos of the Murena 2

The SoC it's a Mediatek Helio P70, the smartphone has 6.43 inches with 128GB of internal memory and 8GB of RAM. The processor is a 2.1GHz quad-core. It has three photo sensors and can accommodate two nano SIMs. The version they gave us does not yet have an active fingerprint sensor but it should be on the back (however, we were not able to test it). Pre-installed we found /e/OS at version 1.17 e Android 13.

Two hardware gems immediately catch the eye: on the left and right sides there are two switches, i.e two physical switches: the one on the left will allow you to disable cameras and microphones (from what we understand it is actually a physical disconnection and not just on the software side) while the other will allow you to activate airplane mode while also activating silent. This last switch, we were told, will be somewhat customizable in later versions. We don't yet know how and how much but we find it to be an interesting option.

These keys are certainly an excellent move in terms of marketing, however we would like to remind you that from Android 12 there are Privacy Indicators ¹ that is, notifications that warn you when an application asks for permission to use the camera or microphone. Furthermore, it is possible to remove microphone and camera permissions from all applications that you think are insecure. However, it must also be said that you have to physically look at your phone to see this notification and you may not notice if it happens when it is in your pocket or when you are simply distracted. In short, it certainly doesn't hurt to have a similar switch so these are welcome found even if they were just advertising: in our opinion they can help make people more attentive to their privacy.

Pre-installed applications

Let's now come to the pre-installed applications. As mentioned, the smartphone is produced with the degoogled operating system /e/OS which we have already talked about. Here is a list of pre-installed applications and the information we found about them:

• Lounge App, is their official store. Inside you will find a bit of everything: from the applications present on the Play Store to those present on F-Droid. Aesthetically it is very reminiscent Aurora Store (there is also the possibility of logging in with a Google account or anonymously) and also takes advantage of its API ². If you don't find it to your liking, you don't have to use it: just install Aurora Store And F-Droid separately.
• Activity, a very simple local application of to-do list.
• BlissLauncher, is the official launcher of /e/OS. Aesthetically pleasing, it is somewhat reminiscent of famous brands such as Huawei for example.
• Browsers, it's a Fork Of Chromite. We didn't particularly appreciate this Browsers: for example, when it arrived, it seemed stuck at version 117 Chromium while we have already arrived at 119. In our humble opinion it is worth installing a Browsers different as Brave or Mull if you prefer to stay on Firefox. Here is a list of Browsers that we recommend on mobile.
  If you decide to use this Browsers you will see how Search engine default is present spot.murena.io. It is a server managed by Murena based on the project Open source Searxng.
  
• Calculator, Calendar And Contacts, File they are very simple and basic classic applications on Android. Calendar it should be a Fork of Nextcloud Calendar.
• Room, the camera is Fork Of OpenCamera and has different settings for both images and videos with the possibility of inserting localization. We didn't seem to see anything particularly elaborate that is present in most modern cameras, such as spherical photos or slow motion videos.
• Gallery, is the classic Android stock gallery.
• Magic Earth, right from the start the /e/OS operating system decided to come out with these maps pre-installed. Magic Earth is not Open source however it offers excellent navigation with good maps and a decent policy. Given the enormous strides made by Organic Maps It might be time to pre-install a map application Open source?
• Mail, it's a Fork by K-9 Mail. Also in this case you can directly install K-9 Mail, which should soon become Thunderbird Mobile, if you prefer. We don't think this version offers anything more.
• Message, Music And Notes these are also classic stock Android applications. Notes it's a Fork of Nextcloud Notes.
• OpenKeychain it is useful in case you need to use a PGP key.
• Clock It's the classic Android watch.
• PDF Viewer Plus, it's one of them Fork Of PDF Viewer Plus. Quite a bizarre choice as it is an amateur project in a state of semi-abandonment. Maybe it was better to have something else pre-installed that was more up to date and recent like MJ PDF?
• Recorder, Android Keyboard (AOSP) And Telephone are other classic stock Android applications.

Murena's cloud

As you may have noticed there are several applications that derive from Nextcloud. This because Murena aims to give a complete ecosystem together with your smartphone. A Murena Cloud account is available to anyone and it costs €2 per month for 20GB, €4 per month for 64GB and €6 per month for 128GB. There are also more expensive plans from 256GB, 1TB And 2TB. It's a classic account Nextcloud with which you can therefore have calendar, drive, contacts and much more. If you don't know what it is Nextcloud we refer you to our article.

Advanced Privacy

One of the most interesting software features is almost certainly the call setting Advanced Privacy. It's essentially a sort of pre-installed firewall that allows you to keep track of everyone tracers (forgive the pun) and helps you hide your location or IP.

As for the tracers it is possible to enable protection on the entire smartphone while also managing the various installed applications individually. In fact, if any application gives you problems, just try deactivating the protection tracers and check if it works properly again. You can also see the statistics of how many tracers have been blocked and which applications are the most invasive.

Then there is position protection. In this case you can decide between two options: use a plausible random location (so not in the middle of the ocean) or you can give it a specific location where you want to pretend to be. This option should be used with caution as it could cause problems with some applications: for example with Where Are U or with car sharing or food delivery applications.

The last option instead allows you to hide your IP address using the Tor network. In this case, as is rightly suggested, be careful and exclude some applications such as email services as there is the risk of being banned if several strange accesses are noticed made from IP addresses to which you are not used, especially if they are Tor exit nodes. This feature is also interesting and allows you to either go out with a country chosen by you or one at random.

This option resembles very closely Orbot in fact we see that in theirs too source code orbotservice is present ^{3 4}, it is possible and very probable that this function is a Fork therefore of the Orbot project.

The combination of these three options in a single pre-installed application is undoubtedly very interesting: you could avoid using the VPN slot by taking advantage of the antitracker and IP change.

Daily use

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In our daily use we have not encountered any major defects other than those already present and already known in smartphones that use microG instead of the original Google services. For example, some (few) applications simply have no intention of working, one of which is Eni's car sharing application Enjoy. We would like to underline that these applications on smartphones with GrapheneOS (where an isolated version of Google services is used ⁵) generally work. To check whether an application works or not with microG you can use this list made by us or this other site.

We hope this part is not too complex or difficult to understand, but we feel it is necessary to warn those who want to use these smartphones that There may be problems especially for certain applications and it is essential to know this beforehand. If you have any doubts about this part we are waiting for you Telegram, Matrix or Feddit.

Even the fluidity of the smartphone honestly didn't drive us crazy at all. We make the comparison with a Pixel 6 (a smartphone from two years ago therefore) with it installed GrapheneOS and therefore already with Android 14. Not that it is slow of course, but it simply seemed a little slow in the animations and in moving between applications.

We have not found any way to block the connectivity of individual applications. This is a real lack of /e/OS as this, in our fundamental opinion, is instead present on both LineageOS what up GrapheneOS. Also the iode firewall it is definitely much more advanced and interesting in this regard.

Unlocking the bootloader

Once they heard about this review, many asked us whether the Murena 2 will have an unlockable bootloader or not, to also understand whether it will be possible to install ROMs other than the pre-installed one. The answer we were given was: In the final model you will be able to unlock and re-lock the bootloader. So the bootloader will be unlockable And relockable.

Conclusions

We really like the fact that Murena and /e/OS in general does not try to continually reinvent the wheel but rather exploits and uses projects Open source already well run in and working. It seems to us to be an important point to avoid unpleasant lock-ins and this certainly helps to improve existing open projects as improvements and updates are often made which can then be taken up from time to time by the authors of the applications themselves.

So in our opinion they are on the right track on this point. As for the rest, it is certainly an excellent compromise for those who are used to buying smartphones without having to do anything tinkering. The smartphone arrives ready and degoogled and if you have already made a de-googling path the fact of not finding any Google application inside is certainly less destabilizing. However, it is probably too expensive for the type of hardware that is offered, the risk is that it really ages too quickly.

Our advice is to buy it only if you have no intention of trying to do anything independently and if you want something ready to use. Alternatively we think that purchasing a Pixel, even a used one, with above GrapheneOS is currently one of the easiest and most affordable alternatives for almost everyone, in addition obviously toinstall /e/OS yourself or LineageOS or other alternative operating systems.

1. Privacy Indicators[↩]
2. APIs[↩]
3. Orbotservice[↩]
4. Privacy Module Tor[↩]
5. Sandboxed Google Play[↩]

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