11–20 of 71 posts
Light Phone dudes, if your whole thing is going to be future-proofing and "planned obsolescence remains an outrage to us," maybe don't stick III at the end of your product's name.
Oh how I long and wish that my phone had screws. This glued-shut brittle glass box with a puffy time bomb inside makes me sad.
It's sad that the concept of a phone with screws makes me so happy.
As others have said, by the time it's flexible enough to have all the apps I need, it's flexible enough to have all the apps I don't want. It's a shame they got rid of the eink display, that was one of the key selling points of the previous model for me.
But I have a lot of trouble seeing a new piece of hardware being the solution. Sure, this thing only does a handful of things, and that's it. There's no temptation to install the latest game, or a bunch of different messaging and social apps, because there's only so much you can actually do with the phone. It's basically a "dumb phone" with a few extra features to make it more palatable.
But there's a problem with this simplicity. If you have a need that the phone doesn't meet, you're screwed. The only way to get this phone up-to-spec with other phones is to have a marketplace full of apps, each providing the functionality you desire, and at that point you're just another iOS or Android platform with the same problems.
Just get a phone without much bloat, like a Pixel, Nothing, OnePlus, or Fairphone, and consider putting a custom ROM on it to further scale it down. Then just do regular app maintenance - remove apps you don't want or need anymore, and go through your notification history and shut up every app that you don't need to hear from.
You're not going to be able to have the superpowers of a smartphone without also needing to do some amount of housekeeping. With the power of having a personal computer in your pocket comes the responsibility of taking care of it.
Has anyone had experience switching between the Light Phone and their daily phone on a day-by-day basis? My daily phone is Android, I don't know if that's relevant.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with Google Fi, but I could possibly switch carriers if it came to it.
Shipping Jan 2025, normally $799 retail (does not include tax or shipping). For a phone that's almost certainly running Android under the hood, not having the ability to install Signal or Messenger or anything else just makes it dead on arrival imho.
? , that’s literally the selling point, that you cant install those things in this phone duh. Besides, they know what they are doing, they sell pretty well too. They churn out enough of these each year, that foxconn handles their manufacturing for this unit. They must be selling decent numbers in that case.
Here’s a video of me using various popular android apps on an eink Hisense A9 smartphone. https://youtu.be/dvO9ScTdwz8
TLDR: Great for reading/text/messaging/hacker news, terrible for video and scrolling.
I really want to like this phone, and applaud what they are doing. But...it's still a "phone". Aside from the obvious, how is this fundamentally different (or better) than a defanged iPhone/smartphone? When are we going to rethink this problem of how we integrate networked technology into our daily lives in a way that's healthier for us?