Five years after the launch of the Light Phone 2, co-founder Kaiwei Tang says it is selling better than ever. This is both extremely unusual for a phone and the point of the matter: Tang, co-founder Joe Hollier, and their team built a phone that was designed to do very little and last virtually forever. Their E Ink device became a hit among people looking for a way to get away from their smartphones, to “go light,” in the company’s parlance. The Light Phone 2 made calls, sent text messages and not much else. That has worked very well for many people for a long time.
Now Light is trying to do something different. The company is launching the Light Phone 3, which comes with a new display, a camera, and a few other features that Tang says most users simply can’t live without. The goal is again to build a simpler, less attractive smartphone for when you want to check out, but this time also to perhaps replace your smartphone for good.
The biggest change to the Light Phone 3 is a new display. The E Ink screen is gone, replaced by a 3.92-inch black and white OLED panel. “E Ink, the refresh rate: almost 50 percent of our users couldn’t get used to it,” says Tang. “That’s the main reason they give up.” At 1080 x 1240 pixels, this isn’t the most impressive screen you’ll ever see, but it refreshes faster and should feel familiar to more users. You also control brightness with a new scroll wheel on the left, because Tang says he hates it when a phone automatically just blares light at your face. (The wheel also clicks to turn on the flashlight.)
The lack of a camera on the Light Phone 2 was the other reason, which is why the new model has a rear camera. It’s not a normal smartphone setup, though: it’s just a 50-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel camera on the front, each with a fixed focal length and a central focus. It’s as good for scanning QR codes and video chatting as it is for anything else, Tang says, and because it has a dedicated shutter button, shooting with it should feel more like an old film camera than an iPhone. “There is no editing or sharing required, just document the moment as needed.”
In addition, the device has a number of so-called future-proof upgrades. There is an NFC chip because Light wants to integrate payments at some point. There is a USB-C port, because everyone uses that now. You can replace the battery yourself, making the device last longer. There is a fingerprint reader, a Qualcomm SM 4450 processor, 128 GB of storage and 6 GB of RAM. It’s all in a slightly larger box than before – Tang calls it ‘BlackBerry size’, compared to the credit card-sized Light Phone 2 – and even the aluminum buttons on the side are built to last.
The new phone is available for pre-order now and Tang says it will ship in January. For now, it’s priced at $399, though Tang says he’s not sure what the final price will be. It depends on how much Light is sold. The company’s promotional material states that the retail price of the Light Phone 3 will be $799, which is dangerously close to full-fledged smartphone territory, but the company hopes to sell enough devices to make them a little cheaper to produce, which would meaning could reduce the final price.
The problem with minimalist smartphones (or dumbphones, or feature phones, or whatever you want to call them) for years has been the near-impossible balance they try to strike. How do you make a phone that does everything people need and nothing else? Everyone has their business-critical apps, and they’re always different.
Tang and the Light team have now spent years trying to figure out how to approach that. They’ve built simple tools for music, podcasts, calendar, navigation and notes. They’re thinking about how to integrate the Spotify API, build a way to run Uber or Lyft on the Light Phone, make payments, send voice notes, and more. He is also interested in integrating with Beeper to add more messaging services. Light isn’t decisively against apps, Tang reminds me, except the endless feed apps. It’s just pushing back against the chaos of modern smartphones and trying to find better ways to get the features people want without the chaos that so often comes with it. It’s a difficult balance to find.
Light has also been playing with ChatGPT and other AI tools to see if they can be a way to provide users with more information without subjecting them to endless news feeds and engagement baits. “We have experimented” with AI, Tang says, “but we don’t feel confident that we can set a clear boundary for our users.” Light’s users trust the company to set these boundaries, he says, and he doesn’t want to overdo the features and mislead people.
In some ways, the Light Phone 3 is the least lightweight device the company has made yet. It has more features, more features and more things to do and play with. But Tang hopes this is all in service of the bigger goal, which is to keep people away from their smartphones and the endless notifications and feeds they contain. “I’m not trying to design vintage phones,” he says. “I want to design all this modern technology from the ground up and eliminate all the nonsense.” You can’t beat smartphones with worse phones. Maybe you can do it with different ones.