Dear readers, I have a confession: I suffer from a disease that younger people call “brain sepsis”, the inability to think deeply after excessive rolling on my phone. These days, it’s hard to finish even a book.
Many people have this problem. So many have given birth to a category of minimalist technology products trying to get rid of distractions, from PIN AI, the most highly artificially smart pin to take notes, on phones with only basic features.
The latest example, the Light Phone III $ 600, from Brooklyn’s start, is a stripped phone that does a little. The latest version, which began sending in March and set for a broader release in July, can make calls, send texts, take photos, show map instructions, play music and podcasts and not do much.
There is no web browser. There is also no app store, which means that there is no Uber to spoil a ride, no social media relaxes. There is not even e -mail.
“You use it when you need it, and when you put it back, it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, Light CEO, the start that has developed multiple repetitions of light light over the last nine years. “We get a lot of customers who tell us that they feel less stressed. They become more productive. They become creative.”
I was curious to see if the light phone could cure me with brain sepsis, so I used it as my main phone for a week. There were times when I liked it. While waiting for a train, resting in the gym or eating on my own, I was not tempted to look at the phone screen and felt more careful in my environment. Phone calls sound nice and clean. The Maps app did a nice job that navigated me around the city.
It reminds me of simpler moments that we mainly used phones to discuss before we take them away to focus on other duties.
But during the week, the disadvantages of a DUMBER phone were removed from my enjoyment, and above all that I felt most anxious and less capable. Suddenly I found myself unable to enter a train station, look at the name of a new restaurant or checking my garage door.
Some of them have less relationship with the light phone itself, which is a product and more to how society as a whole has depended on the advanced smartphone features.
Here’s how my week ran things up, moving and going out with a lower technology phone.
Start
When I put the phone review unit during the weekend, the phone, which looks like a black rectangular plate, was quite a bit bone. The phone menu was a black screen showing a list of its features: phone, camera, photo album and alarm. To add more tools, I had to use a web browser to my computer to access a control panel where I could install features such as a map application, notebook and timer.
Now that I was ready to go, I was determined to live, at least for a while, without my iPhone.
Moving to work
On Monday morning, I started my move to work, taking a train from Auckland, California, to San Francisco. When I arrived at the station, I realized that I couldn’t enter my iPhone, because years ago I had turned my natural pass, my clipper card into a virtual stored in my smartphone’s mobile wallet.
The light phone didn’t have a mobile wallet to load the virtual transit card, so I was back home to get my iPhone and eventually appeared in the office for half an hour late.
Going to the gym
I ran into a similar hit one night at the climbing gym. To enter, members use their phones to connect to the gym website and create a temporary linear code that is scanned at the entrance. Because the light phone didn’t have a web browser, I couldn’t create a linear code, so I had to wait on the reception line.
Friends of Friends and Download Photos
I added some of my closest friends to the address book on the light phone and sent them text messages that explain my experiment. The typing on the device’s keyboard felt sloppy in part because there was no automatic correction to correct the printing errors. As a result, the conversations were distorted.
The dignity followed when I sent people to people. Bad illuminated and granular, the images looked like they were produced by a phone camera from at least 15 years ago.
“Retro!” A friend said in response to a blurry photo of my daughter.
“Wow, that’s bad,” said another friend of a faintly illuminated photo of my Corgi, Max.
The founders of Light said they were proud of the light camera, which has a nostalgic feel to it.
Running issues
One afternoon, I had to leave an Amazon return to a UPS store. We chose the most convenient shipping option, which included the appearance of a QR code for scanning.
The problem? The light phone did not have an email or web browser app to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on my computer screen and broke a mediocre image with the phone.
When I brought the package to the UPS and presented the photo, I kept my breath, hoping the image was quite clear. The UPS employee held the scanner and, after three attempts, I heard a sound signal and a printed shipping label.
What a relief, but also, what a hassle.
Lunch date
In another afternoon, my wife and I went out for an improvised meal date. I supported the car out and then I had to ask my wife to use her iPhone to close our garage door with the MyQ app. (Our natural garage door opener stopped working years ago.)
Then we were trying to remember the name of a new sushi restaurant we had recently read on a blog for food. I could not help dig the blog post on the light phone. Eventually, we did a guess and ended up in the wrong restaurant. But it was nice to have lunch together without the temptation to check my email.
Threshold
While I admire the goal of light, my experience proves that there is nothing we can do or buy realistically to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including reaching the city, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolving around our extremely capable smartphones.
This light phone experiment reminded me of Glamping: Paying a lot to have an artificial Crummier experience.
I can’t think of many people whose jobs will let them realistically use a light phone as their only phone. Many of us rely on tools such as slack and email to communicate.
The light phone can be better tailored as a secondary leisure phone, similar to a weekend car, for people disconnected when they are out of work. But even then, the quality of the camera can be a deal switch for some.
Mr Tang, CEO of Light, acknowledged that the light phone was not for everyone, but added that parents had consumed the possibility of buying the phone for their children being less seconded to school. The company also works to add more tools, such as mobile payments and the ability to request a Lyft car.
