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The Light Phone

thelightphone.com

281–290 of 291 posts

Re: The Light Phone

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ou spend $500 - $1500 on a device that can't be expected no, you just buy a model 2 years after its on the market and you pay a fraction of the initial price.

The downside is you get only a year or two of security updates.

You still save something like 400 dollars this way. Not sure what is the actual trade off in your world?

Re: The Light Phone

#282
6 months ago I considered going full dumbphone. The best option was an unlocked jiophone 2 with KaiOS. Unfortunately, spotify has not been ported over yet and the OS is not as polished as I'd like.

I settled with Samsung's mid range line released this year. The Galaxy a20, a30 and a50 are great value for the price when rooted and stripped of all the bloatware.

Re: The Light Phone

#283

6 months ago I considered going full dumbphone. The best option was an unlocked jiophone 2 with KaiOS. Unfortunately, spotify has not been ported over yet and the OS is not as polished as I'd like. I settled with Samsung's mid range line released this year. The Galaxy a20, a30 and a50 are great value for the price when rooted and stripped of all the bloatware.

You want a dumb phone but you want Spotify? Somebody else wants a dumb phone but they want YouTube. Somebody else wants a dumb phone but they want candy crush.

Congratulations. This is why dumb phones don’t exist. Nobody actually wants them.

Re: The Light Phone

#285
post #246
post #156

Do the makers think that there's a sizeable portion of people that hate their iPhones or Galaxies and want to spend $350 on a phone that doesn't do things? Doesn't do social media, doesn't do email, doesn't do news. Most consumers would at this point ask "What's the fucking point?" Smartphones are popular because people want to do the things that they enable. You probably need to live in some sort of a niche social c…

I looked seriously at the first Light Phone. The main problem I found was that it's explicitly designed to be a second phone. You still needed to have a primary smartphone, and it would pair with that (and use the same number, somehow). It was just a phone for "I'm going out to dinner and I don't want to potentially be distracted by the internet, but I still want to be reachable". That seems to me like the intersecti…

Basically the Blackberry of old.

I miss those things. Shame they killed BIS in my country, so those are mostly unusable today.

I think the best way to achieve it all again is to create a set of interlocking apps who help you get things done instead of wooing you with animations for android and create your own distro with those apps pre-setup based on CyanogenMod/LineageOS/etc. This way you can use existing hardware, gain productivity and still be able to access tge appstore for everything someone needs for their personal work flow, like the tan generator of your bank.

Re: The Light Phone

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see how that seems useless to the average neurotypical, but devices with limited functionality are a huge plus for people that fights against strong compulsions. I still think $350 is a lot, but when you have ADHD devices with a lot of features can be very detrimental to your productivity and your well-being.

I don't think you can separate features and price in this case. Looking vaguely iPhone 5-ish is not a feature that should add hundreds of dollars to the price. My last dumb phone, which I bought to carry while cycling, cost me $30. Sure, it was ugly, but since the point is to not take it out of your pocket and play around with it, who cares? This phone strikes me as the veganism of dumb phones. You want people to ack…

I'm not sure if that is the case. They seem to be trying to provide some basic functions so the product remain useful even without regular smartphone features. Whether if they achieve this or not is a more subjective matter.

Re: The Light Phone

#287
post #96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they're using Android so... Probably not much. Display isn't that important to battery life (unless you're using it all the time.)

Yup, exactly. I would have liked to use something like KaiOS, but we had a short deadline and that would have meant porting/rewriting a bunch of Qualcomm drivers for the snapdragon on KaiOS. We also couldn’t preempt the new features we’d like to add (directions, find my phone, etc), so full android felt like a safer option all things considered.

If you go this direction in future, take a look at ofono.

There are QMI as well as AT/RIL drivers in the works.

Re: The Light Phone

#288
post #81

The use case for this is people who want to take it to a social occasion and show it off, while using a regular phone with email, music, podcasts, maps, uber, and social media for most of their daily lives.

Your comment seems insightful to me. Not sure if you’re being down voted.

I agree there’s definitely some virtue signaling by having a high-cost secondary device like this. There’s chatter upthread with a comparison to other forms of virtue signaling that some people do.

Re: The Light Phone

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your relationship with your friends who are not located close to you? P.S. Please don't mind the bland nature of my question.

Honest question, do you need to be reachable 24/7 to have a relationship with your friends?

Not necessarily. DnD 24/7 means; the time they wish to reach you, they cannot.

Re: The Light Phone

#290

6 months ago I considered going full dumbphone. The best option was an unlocked jiophone 2 with KaiOS. Unfortunately, spotify has not been ported over yet and the OS is not as polished as I'd like. I settled with Samsung's mid range line released this year. The Galaxy a20, a30 and a50 are great value for the price when rooted and stripped of all the bloatware.

You want a dumb phone but you want Spotify? Somebody else wants a dumb phone but they want YouTube. Somebody else wants a dumb phone but they want candy crush. Congratulations. This is why dumb phones don’t exist. Nobody actually wants them.

Smartphones barely beat the feature phone market share in 2013. That is not too long ago. Q1 2019 saw a 40% market share with high adoptions in India, Africa and Latin America. This is because in developing countries, data is expensive.

I believe you know better than the multiple investors putting 80m into KaiOS to enable whatsapp, facebook messenger and hopefully spotify on features phones.

People smart phones, they just can't afford them.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kai-technologies

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