The Light Phone: for $150 you can get a (quiet) downtime stand-in for your hyper-connected... [+]
The iPhone X is a featured-packed technological marvel. The Light Phone isn't. But each represents a vision of the mobile phone future.
For a part -- albeit small part -- of the device-toting population The Light Phone is a godsend. A tiny, eminently-pocketable, credit-card-sized mobile phone stripped down to the bare essentials: making phone calls. That's it.
The newer Light Phone 2 -- still in the prototype stage* -- adds messaging and an alarm clock.
No, it isn't going to outsell the iPhone X or the iPhone SE (Apple's smallest iPhone). But it's a vision I can subscribe to -- at least some of the time.
The Light Phone can use the same number as your primary smartphone so it can be a downtime proxy. For me (like most people) downtime means trying not to be hyper-connected. So, carrying around something like the Light Phone -- instead of my iPhone X -- makes sense.
Along these lines, some are rethinking the flip phone. The flip has a newfound "low-tech appeal to the burgeoning #DeleteFacebook crowd," as the Seattle Times recently put it.
'With a smartphone, you spend so much time texting...in constant communication, that you don’t have time to do anything else.'
--"A simple flip phone is the new protest statement," Seattle Times, April 15, 2018
The iPhone X is a marvel but...
Of course I can just put my iPhone X in Do Not Disturb mode, or airplane mode, or just turn it off for a while.
But face it, if you have something as cool as the iPhone X, you're going to use all of its hyper-connected goodness. I certainly do. The problem is, the hyper-connected future will likely only get more intense.
So I like the idea of something really small that's designed from the ground up to be non-intrusive.
And it's encouraging to see a company that invokes the old Apple slogan, "think different."
The Light Phone is $150. To keep the Light Phone SIM card active you pay $5 per month. Here's the Light Phone FAQ.
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*I received a response about the Light Phone 2 from Kaiwei Tang a co-founder of the company: "Our plan is to kick off our vendor’s factory in May this year and will be doing several prototyping builds during the next few months with the factories.
"We will continue to take pre-orders after the IndieGoGo campaign and the first shipment of Light Phone 2 is estimated to be out before April 2019."
