The Light Phone is an unlocked 4G LTE phone with an E-Ink screen, that can call, text, and act as a hotspot. But it doesn’t have much else beyond an alarm, calculator, music player, podcast player, notes, calendar, and directions.
Basically, it’s a phone designed to be unusable on social media or for doom scrolling, and it’s getting more and more tempting.
Does anyone have experience with it? It’s $300 but if it does what it says I might be tempted.
I must admit I’m very intrigued, seems like a very cool concept. At $300 I’m not getting anywhere near it as an early adopter; too many similar ‘flash in the pan’ projects/products like this in the past. I’d miss having a camera, but other than a few apps there’s not much I’d miss from my Android phone. If they turn out to have a quality product and some staying power I’d consider it in the future.
That’s basically where I am, but I do see some notes about a “LightPhone I” which indicates this is the second one, so they must have been “good enough” to make another.
I actually found out about it because I was searching Saddleback Leather to see which iPhone cases they had, and noticed this: Leather Light Phone II Case | Saddleback - which is a pretty decent review and accolade.
The lack of a camera is a bit sad, it would be nice if it could take pictures even it had to resort to a physical hole in the phone as a viewfinder.
huh… I’ve admired Saddleback for their style and quality for years [too addicted to cordura nylon to spend the money on leather gear though], but I respect the company even more after reading that ‘product overview’. Good on 'em.
I’m sure it does what it says. The question is, “How well?”
After running for a year with the Flip IV, things like “Can it handle a heavy and long text messaging thread?” are questions that I now ask that I didn’t even think about before - KaiOS was dreadful at handling it, and more than about 100 text messages on the phone total would start impacting performance, and a few hundred would just choke it out. I had to constantly prune my text messages, and it was generally a pain - until some other events happened that involved a large and rapidly moving group text thread which would have utterly crushed the phone. I’d gone back to iOS by then, because the keyboard was failing on me…
Just get a good point and shoot. I got in the habit, and they’re pocket sized or backpack sized easily enough.
The Flip had a camera, and it was just about worse than nothing. It took horrible photos.
I’m certainly interested in the Light Phone, but I’m not sure I want to drop $300 on it either.
If I had known about it when trying to find my mom a phone, I might have gone with it, we spent almost that much trying various flip phones until we could find one that a. worked with Ting b. was simple enough for her to use and c. wasn’t killed by the great 3G switch off or whatever it was they did recently.
I kind of wish she’d be willing to use an iPhone but she’s cared to death of them; and it took everything the 4th commandment allows to get my dad to try his (which I mainly pushed because at least if I have to replace it, I can replace it with something that operates almost exactly the same).
Slightly OT: I have a few Saddleback pieces and while their full-on briefcase is ridiculously too heavy for anyone but a fairly tank-like individual, their smaller pieces are wonderful and one of their satchels is a major part of my EDC rotation. I’m happy with what I got for my money, definitely.
Yeah, I have quite a bit and while some are very heavy, I’m satisfied with them. I’ve begun using the soft briefcase (not sure what it’s called) and it barely fits my laptop, and is nice to carry.
It’s also nice to not have to worry about the kids breaking them.
Hm. Do they make anything that qualifies as “larger luggage that Southwest baggage handlers won’t destroy”?
I have the large suitcase (got it on a Dave’s deals almost a decade ago or more) and it has been on about four flights a year as checked baggage with various airlines and the only real damage so far is this:
(Wow that phone upload may be huge)
Someday I may bother patching that but it hasn’t harmed the integrity of the suitcase. I’ve had pelican cases die under similar situations (the wheels are usually the part that breaks).
If I really wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be harmed i would go with the beast duffel as that is softer sided and will deform rather than get torn when stabbed.
Well, this post has inspired me to look at the state of the dumb devices again, and I have a Sonim XP3+ on order to mess with. It’s a rugged flip device (waterproof, should be generally beat-against-a-rock proof) running Android 11 Go, which supports sideloading of stuff - but it doesn’t support the accessibility mouse cursor stuff quite right. So I’ll toss a small Bluetooth keyboard/mouse in my bag for when I’m on the go with it.
