I tested out the premium dumbphone everyone’s talking about – my buying advice a month later
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Much attention has been paid to the idea of a “dumbphone.” We’ve all had the thought: how liberating it would be to ditch the smartphone forever, freeing yourself from the shackles of social media, the endless stream of notifications, and after-hours work emails.
The problem is that we’re used to a certain aesthetic experience. The idea of going back to a flip phone or lo-fi early-2000s Motorola might be exciting in theory, but navigating a 2.8-inch display, physical buttons, or worse — T9 texting — is, in practice, more trouble than it’s worth.
The interface is as simple as it could be: menus are made of text, and everything is monochromatic. There are no icons, and there are no colors. It’s point-and-click functionality, and it’s refreshing.
That being said, there is a color camera with a 50m rear sensor and 8m front sensor, producing 12m default images and video that look better than I expected. You can store them on the device and send them via text message, but there are no editing functions.
There is also some hardware on the phone that isn’t fully functional yet. The fingerprint sensor at the top of the device won’t be enabled for three to four weeks after launch. And there’s an NFC chip inside the device for tap-to-pay integrations in the future, but it’s currently dormant.
The back of the Light Phone 3: all black.
Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET
Ahead of the Light Phone 3 launch, I met with the two co-founders of Light: Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier. They made it clear that email functionality on the Light Phone was not on the table.
“Separating email from my phone makes me a lot more intentional when I sit down to write one,” Hollier told me. He shared an anecdote about being on vacation at the beach and reaching for his smartphone, only to catch a work email and have his mood completely deflated. It’s something we’ve all experienced.
As far as the more sophisticated features go, there’s a great selection of Podcasts, which you can set up in the Dash, the portal you can access in a browser to make changes to your Light Phone or account.
There are also Directions, which are like a simplified version of Google Maps. The Directions feature uses the Here Maps API, which is widely used across different navigation and location-based services like Garmin and Lyft, so it’s running on a solid foundation.
The Calendar tool.
Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET
The other big integration is with Spotify. The idea is to use a minimal, stripped-down version of the app that just streams the playlists you’ve already made. Currently, the only way to listen to music on the Light Phone 3 is with audio files you physically move onto the device.
For now, the Light Phone 3 is a minimal experience, to say the least. One of the first things that becomes apparent with the Light Phone 3 is that, well, there’s not much to do with it. You can’t pick it up and mine for dopamine by scrolling, there’s nothing to “check,” and there’s no deluge of information at your fingertips.
is much more appealing, but even that is not exactly cheap.
Second, the 1,800mAh battery on the Light Phone 3 is rather limited. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t last nearly as long as I had first expected it to, especially for a minimalist device. This could be optimized in future software updates, and I’d love to see the phone last longer when idle or otherwise not in use.
