> The biggest benefit this could have is a smart-ish phone with multiple days of active use battery life. Instead they specced a 500mah battery
Take any Android phone, uninstall all messaging apps, disable all other forms of background transfers and sync (increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS).
Enjoy your 3 to 4 day battery life.
You said active use, but this phone doesn't have any active uses, by design.
Standby time on modern smart phones isn't half bad, if you get rid of everything that wakes up the device!
There doesn't even seem to be anything smart-ish about it, except that it uses the same form factor.
>It brings a few essential tools to the Light Phone, like messaging, an alarm clock, or a ride home
And yet further down it says that these are not even definite features, but "some features that we might explore".
Clearly the appearance is the selling point. From a utility perspective flip/button phones make a lot more sense if you're only using them as phones.
$300 seems quite a stretch when there are a huge variety of dirt cheap dumb phones around. How about a Jenny TV 2.8 [1] with 175 hours standby for $30 at Amazon?
Or a Nokia 130 with up to a month of standby, which sells for around $25 in India. [2]
If this one actually launches and gets a small following, I'm sure there will be copycats that are able to create and release better versions. I don't think this will be a commercial success but it may inspire others.
They're trying to sell flip-phone functionality for $300 by positioning this as a "lifestyle" purchase. "We call this experience 'going light'." That may work; it got their Kickstarter funded.
A sunlight-readable ruggedized e-ink phone would be useful. But that's not their target market.
Starting a hardware product by making a niche product and expanding the market and device complexity over iterations on the hardware is a proven success path. "Active" apps require third party buy in, which is hard for a new company to achieve.
Yeah, if there really is a "simplification" market why just built out a number of useful data services over SMS and encourage folks to buy old feature phones with just talk and text functionality.
That lead me to the KaiOS webpage out of curiosity.
KaiOS is apparently a fork of Boot 2 Gecko, so all JS. The dev portal is alright, but the main website is unusable and takes over the scroll in a huge way.
For $300 I'd expect longer battery life and international band support. Old Nokia's were $50 and still usable in most of the world - this is a step backward.
Look at the Galaxy Pocket Neo released for the African markets for instance, priced at less than $130 at release, had 3 days battery life and would be considered a modern smart phone.
This on the other hand, has much less capability in a less robust form and costs double that.
>For $300 I'd expect longer battery life and international band support. Old Nokia's were $50 and still usable in most of the world - this is a step backward.
2g/3g probably works around the world. notice how they mentioned band 1/2/3/whatever support, which isn't used to describe 2g/3g frequencies. i'm guessing the only reason your nokia could work anywhere around the world is because there are only a few bands for 2g/3g. whereas there are a few dozen for lte.
Last Nokia (150, not sure) I have costs $30 or so and has a battery life of about 2 weeks with normal use. So yeah, I'd love e-Ink, but it should be worth it.
I really want an e-ink phone. But not really that phone. It seems really just to be a fashion statement. I worry it'll have very little practical utility.
The best implementation I've heard of so far was YotaPhone 2 - https://yotaphone.com/gb-en/. A proper smartphone with two screens - normal one on the front, an e-ink on the back. I was considering to buy it some time ago, but I discovered the product was abandoned. If someone could re-do this concept, but put the specs of ~Galaxy S7 inside, I'd buy that in a heartbeat, even at flagship prices.
Or even better, I'd love if someone could make a proper e-ink tablet. Give me 12.3-inch e-ink touchscreen and a software stack that would let me read, browse, write e-mails and run a text editor on it, and it'll be my new go-to machine. If I could hook up a keyboard to it and run Emacs on it (even terminal Emacs via SSH), I'd be in heaven.
The best part of the Light Phone 2 is that pitch video. Showing how pervasive (invasive) smartphones have been become. Bullseye.
As appealing as the Light Phone 2 is... Google Maps was the killer feature that got me to board the smartphone crazy train. Especially when traveling. The thought of forfeiting maps gives me pangs of separation anxiety.
I bought the light phone (1), it's a complete piece of garbage. Controls & feels like some of the crappy stuff from around 2000. I tried to use it once, but it turned out to be unusable outside due to being white and reflecting more sunlight than it's leds/display could produce... (I did feel stupid at that point, yes).
Hope they do a better job at this one & then, maybe, if they drop the price by 50% I'd consider it.
Looks cool, but I wish some phone maker could come up with a phone that's actually ergonomic. Remember how well old Nokias used to fit the hand? Now it seems like every phone on the market is a slippery glass rectangle.
I leave my phone behind and take my Apple Watch Series 3 with me sometimes. The watch is much less distracting than a smart phone while keeping basic connectivity.
The Apple Watch Series 3 has almost all of the features of the Light Phone 2 (missing battery life), and is equally as non-distracting. The Light Phone 2 is missing several features of Apple Watch Series 3 like Health Kit and Apple Pay. Configuring call forwarding and message forwarding is much simpler with Apple Watch than it is for Light Phone. Preordering a Light Phone 2 costs $300 and and will ship next April. Buying an Apple Watch Series 3 costs $320 and you can pick you up today.
If you have an iPhone I would recommend an Apple Watch to someone wanting to leave the phone behind from time to time instead of this. This might be more useful to spending days away from a charging station, someone without an iPhone, or someone that doesn't like wearing watches.
I assume there is an Android Watch product with most of the big features of the Apple Watch too.
I disable notifications i don't care / are not notificatin worthy.
I remove myself from newsletters.
I use the 'Do not disturb' mode.
I don't need an 'light' phone. I need my phone as powerful as it is right now when i wanna use google maps, it should be fast and responsive and with great details.
I like how so many of these comments are claiming that this company is missing the mark / doing it wrong / out of touch, and yet the project is >600% funded.
Missing the mark and getting overly-crowdfunded aren't mutually exclusive. The Ouya comes to mind, it was an absolute hit on Kickstarter (904% funded) and completely missed the mark.
The other commenter mentioned the Ouya but there are also outright scams that have been fully funded. This includes a device whose "creators" claimed it could allow you to breathe underwater.
Companies continually miss the mark when it comes to neo-dumbphones -- folks that want a dumbphone badly enough to seek one out, and I count myself in this category, want one that is small, very durable, foolproof, and inexpensive.
These features were all common on old dumbphones like the previously-mentioned Nokia and some Motorolas [or Jitterbugs]. Whenever a 'hip' dumbphone is released, such as this one or the regrettably-named 'Punkt,' they look cool but fail miserably in two or more of those criteria.
Wouldn't allowing apps defeat the purpose of having a phone like this? Allowing users to install more apps would get in the way of having a simple phone.
- People call you on your phone number, so you have to swap your sim card from smart-phone to this every time you want to "go light". Also phone-book sync, etc.
> you can leave behind your smartphone more often... or for good
If I were spending $US300 on a phone, it ought to be my daily driver.
So I would assume this is for people who, if they do want to access social media on iOS/Android then they do it from the comfort of a large screen device such as a wifi-only iPad, tethering to their 4G dumbphone.
Oh and there's nothing preventing an e-ink device from using a cloud addressbook.
I think the display on my kindle is about as solid as a cellphone display...I carry mine around in a cargo pocket and it regularly gets slammed into furniture.
I mean, i do break them, but I break cellphones, too, and I treat my kindles rather harder than I treat my cellphone.
The phone number thing isn't an issue. On/off Call Forwarding is easy to set up on the first Light Phone. I can toggle it with a voice command to Google Assistant on my Pixel.
Nah, The GSM standard allows for a one-to-many relationship between MDNs & IMSIs. It's just a row in a database at a telco. Several providers already offer the ability to attach multiple lines to a single dialed number.
I couldn't care less about the licenses, however the pricing of that thing immediately means no to my purchase. Especially positioning $300 as an awesome discount from $400.
It will be difficult to “go light” if you will have to carry a DSLR with you instead of having a camera in your phone. Nowadays camera in a phone is just as important as a phone capabilities itself, especially for families with kids.
Depends on the person but even with my Smartphone I rarely use my camera if I had a eink phone it wouldn't be too different for me just that I wont be able to use Signal.
It's definitely looking outstanding and simple which is something I like but: there's no backlight even in old-fashioned electroluminescence form and there are situations where external light isn't enough. I'd like to know if company is collecting any data of device usage and how secure this LightOS is. There's only English language available which eliminates it as my mother's current HTC 8S replacement - while it's similar in size and simplicity of use, she would prefer seeing UI in native language.
Are there any owners of previous model who could share their experience?
I like the look of the hardware, particularly the e-ink ink display, but can't say the software UX appeals to me. I agree that the modern smartphone experience by default is cognitively impairing (too many notifications), but that's something I'd like to have control over, rather than take it or leave it.
I think making the software side extensible could make this a great phone for hackers.
I'm agreed with everyone who's pointing out that self-control is a fine solution to the same problem. But this is a great-looking phone that's small. Skinny pants are still pretty in, and even smaller smartphones are too big for the pockets. You're using it for going out at night anywhere that stays warm in the evening.
It needs to have that "ride home" feature, and probably "rides anywhere." If that works I might spend $300 on it just for the 12ish nights a year I would use it--it's a small cost compared to babysitter, restaurant, show, Lyfts, etc.
[+] [-] iodiniemetra|7 years ago|reply
Also it's $3-400. Insane.
I can get a commodity android phone for $150, remove all of the apps, and with a little self control have the same thing.
It looks good, though.
[+] [-] com2kid|7 years ago|reply
Take any Android phone, uninstall all messaging apps, disable all other forms of background transfers and sync (increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS).
Enjoy your 3 to 4 day battery life.
You said active use, but this phone doesn't have any active uses, by design.
Standby time on modern smart phones isn't half bad, if you get rid of everything that wakes up the device!
[+] [-] ddeck|7 years ago|reply
>It brings a few essential tools to the Light Phone, like messaging, an alarm clock, or a ride home
And yet further down it says that these are not even definite features, but "some features that we might explore".
Clearly the appearance is the selling point. From a utility perspective flip/button phones make a lot more sense if you're only using them as phones.
$300 seems quite a stretch when there are a huge variety of dirt cheap dumb phones around. How about a Jenny TV 2.8 [1] with 175 hours standby for $30 at Amazon?
Or a Nokia 130 with up to a month of standby, which sells for around $25 in India. [2]
[1] http://bluproducts.com/jenny-tv-2-8
[2] https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/nokia-130
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VikingCoder|7 years ago|reply
Kindle Paperwhite is 1420 mAh...
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
A sunlight-readable ruggedized e-ink phone would be useful. But that's not their target market.
[+] [-] lev99|7 years ago|reply
Starting a hardware product by making a niche product and expanding the market and device complexity over iterations on the hardware is a proven success path. "Active" apps require third party buy in, which is hard for a new company to achieve.
[+] [-] 0x445442|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|7 years ago|reply
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-8110-4g-banana-p...
About $100 too. Might just pick one up for fun to see how it goes.
[+] [-] hajile|7 years ago|reply
KaiOS is apparently a fork of Boot 2 Gecko, so all JS. The dev portal is alright, but the main website is unusable and takes over the scroll in a huge way.
[+] [-] Mandatum|7 years ago|reply
Look at the Galaxy Pocket Neo released for the African markets for instance, priced at less than $130 at release, had 3 days battery life and would be considered a modern smart phone.
This on the other hand, has much less capability in a less robust form and costs double that.
[+] [-] gruez|7 years ago|reply
2g/3g probably works around the world. notice how they mentioned band 1/2/3/whatever support, which isn't used to describe 2g/3g frequencies. i'm guessing the only reason your nokia could work anywhere around the world is because there are only a few bands for 2g/3g. whereas there are a few dozen for lte.
[+] [-] stinos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
The best implementation I've heard of so far was YotaPhone 2 - https://yotaphone.com/gb-en/. A proper smartphone with two screens - normal one on the front, an e-ink on the back. I was considering to buy it some time ago, but I discovered the product was abandoned. If someone could re-do this concept, but put the specs of ~Galaxy S7 inside, I'd buy that in a heartbeat, even at flagship prices.
Or even better, I'd love if someone could make a proper e-ink tablet. Give me 12.3-inch e-ink touchscreen and a software stack that would let me read, browse, write e-mails and run a text editor on it, and it'll be my new go-to machine. If I could hook up a keyboard to it and run Emacs on it (even terminal Emacs via SSH), I'd be in heaven.
[+] [-] eat_veggies|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://remarkable.com
[+] [-] specialist|7 years ago|reply
The best part of the Light Phone 2 is that pitch video. Showing how pervasive (invasive) smartphones have been become. Bullseye.
As appealing as the Light Phone 2 is... Google Maps was the killer feature that got me to board the smartphone crazy train. Especially when traveling. The thought of forfeiting maps gives me pangs of separation anxiety.
[+] [-] polshaw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valeg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d--b|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holstvoogd|7 years ago|reply
I bought the light phone (1), it's a complete piece of garbage. Controls & feels like some of the crappy stuff from around 2000. I tried to use it once, but it turned out to be unusable outside due to being white and reflecting more sunlight than it's leds/display could produce... (I did feel stupid at that point, yes).
Hope they do a better job at this one & then, maybe, if they drop the price by 50% I'd consider it.
[+] [-] dbuder|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whitepoplar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lev99|7 years ago|reply
The Apple Watch Series 3 has almost all of the features of the Light Phone 2 (missing battery life), and is equally as non-distracting. The Light Phone 2 is missing several features of Apple Watch Series 3 like Health Kit and Apple Pay. Configuring call forwarding and message forwarding is much simpler with Apple Watch than it is for Light Phone. Preordering a Light Phone 2 costs $300 and and will ship next April. Buying an Apple Watch Series 3 costs $320 and you can pick you up today.
If you have an iPhone I would recommend an Apple Watch to someone wanting to leave the phone behind from time to time instead of this. This might be more useful to spending days away from a charging station, someone without an iPhone, or someone that doesn't like wearing watches.
I assume there is an Android Watch product with most of the big features of the Apple Watch too.
[+] [-] sigi45|7 years ago|reply
I disable notifications i don't care / are not notificatin worthy. I remove myself from newsletters. I use the 'Do not disturb' mode.
I don't need an 'light' phone. I need my phone as powerful as it is right now when i wanna use google maps, it should be fast and responsive and with great details.
[+] [-] joshwcomeau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcbay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bakary|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterOctober|7 years ago|reply
These features were all common on old dumbphones like the previously-mentioned Nokia and some Motorolas [or Jitterbugs]. Whenever a 'hip' dumbphone is released, such as this one or the regrettably-named 'Punkt,' they look cool but fail miserably in two or more of those criteria.
[+] [-] asherism|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonaltr|7 years ago|reply
While I agree that it's just android under the hood - a price of $300+ and not letting developers get in on the action is just too much for me.
[+] [-] netsec_burn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacknews|7 years ago|reply
- People call you on your phone number, so you have to swap your sim card from smart-phone to this every time you want to "go light". Also phone-book sync, etc.
- e-ink displays are incredibly fragile.
[+] [-] petecox|7 years ago|reply
If I were spending $US300 on a phone, it ought to be my daily driver.
So I would assume this is for people who, if they do want to access social media on iOS/Android then they do it from the comfort of a large screen device such as a wifi-only iPad, tethering to their 4G dumbphone.
Oh and there's nothing preventing an e-ink device from using a cloud addressbook.
[+] [-] lsc|7 years ago|reply
I think the display on my kindle is about as solid as a cellphone display...I carry mine around in a cargo pocket and it regularly gets slammed into furniture.
I mean, i do break them, but I break cellphones, too, and I treat my kindles rather harder than I treat my cellphone.
[+] [-] chibg10|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonmum|7 years ago|reply
hmm, i have the opposite impression. compared to lcd, eink displays seem pretty robust.
[+] [-] futhey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobodyshere|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaphp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
I lived with a dumb phone for a long time.
I know have a one plus 6 with very good camera capabilities, but I use it only to take a picture of things I'm too lazy to note.
There is a niche for this.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicky0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|7 years ago|reply
Are there any owners of previous model who could share their experience?
[+] [-] gnode|7 years ago|reply
I think making the software side extensible could make this a great phone for hackers.
[+] [-] passive|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_morgan|7 years ago|reply
It needs to have that "ride home" feature, and probably "rides anywhere." If that works I might spend $300 on it just for the 12ish nights a year I would use it--it's a small cost compared to babysitter, restaurant, show, Lyfts, etc.