20 years ago I picked up a smartphone and never really put it back down Back then it was Blackberry and Palm and Windows Mobile Today it’s Android or iPhone but either way it’s been a love affair I mean my smartphone puts the bulk of human knowledge at my fingertips me talk to anyone I’ve ever known through wireless earbuds making sure I never miss a notification thanks to my wireless smartwatch It is phenomenal and it’s miraculous and it’s everything my teenage self never dared dream possible And it is ruining my life I’m not alone in this Maybe you’ve noticed it in your own experience It’s not just the ceaseless litany of notifications micro doing us with dopamine hundreds of times a day It’s the apps with algorithms built expressly to keep us in our screens The scrolling that as Haley Neon says shortens our attention spans which lowers our tolerance for stillness which inspires us to scroll more The irony of the phone she writes is that it feeds and starves us both That digital dependence has recently spawned a rebellion of sorts in the rise of the new dumb phone a specialty device purpose-built to insulate you from the attention industrial complex And this one is called the Light Phone It’s the third such model from the company of the same name And when I pre-ordered it last summer I knew then that my video about it wouldn’t just be a review It would be the first time since 2005 that I would purposely ditch my smartphone all my smartphones and try to live life a different way for at least 2 weeks And while I think I ultimately failed that has less to do with the light phone than the kind of lifestyle that someone named Mr Mobile needs to lead [Music] With 10 years in business and three phone models under its belt the Brooklynbased Light Company has some expertise in the dumb phone arena which the Light Phone 3 showcases beautifully The toolbox within the box is the product of a partnership with Japan’s Toyo Steel and the phone inside is delightfully distinct from any other Sure the aluminum recycled plastic and glass materials are familiar but they’ve been remixed into a deck of cards sized device that’s more approachable and palm friendly than your typical monster slab In the hand it feels more like a high-end camera than a phone right down to the clicky tactility of the buttons studding its sides Now sure I’ve got nits to pick I wish the side wheel had a bit more resistance to its spin There’s a slight bowing of the battery door And the vibration motor is the less satisfying erm buzzer instead of the tighter LRA I’d expect in a product this pricey But those are hardly deal breakers Even two weeks later I find myself unconsciously fidgeting with this phone or just absent-mindedly admiring it Its design is somehow both alien and obvious like a commlink prop from a Star Wars film or something And every aspect of the phone’s design serves its greater purpose While the 3.9 in screen is a color AMOLED almost all of the software is done up in stark black and white The digital pixels softened by a satin diffusion layer on the glass that at times evokes the e-aper of the prior light phone While e-aper remains more readable in sunlight that’s why the side wheel is here to make brightness adjustments as easy as possible And clicking it fires up the flashlight which is kind of cool Only a couple times in 2 weeks did the sun come close to overpowering the display on mine And if you want you can invert the colors to help with that The underpinnings of this software are Android the deoogled open- source version But the light OS interface is simple to a fault Just words but good words Words in a sans serif ll accurate type face offering up a dead simple list of tools Out of the box the phone only ships with a handful but log into Light’s web interface and you can add as many as 14 for free I was relieved to see that this includes both a podcast app and a music player and managing those is an interesting blend of old school and modern approaches To populate your podcasts you have a rudimentary search function or you can directly paste their RSS links And to load music you need to own it Which means for Spotify suckers like me my entire collection of tunes peters out somewhere around 2012 You upload those tracks to Lights servers up to 20 gigs of them and they’ll wirelessly sync back down to the phone so you can stream them to your Bluetooth headphones or play them aloud on the phone’s surprisingly beefy speakers [Music] And when you want to transfer pictures from the phone’s camera you do that the vintage way too with a cable to your computer or you can text them Oh my favorite cloud-based cleverness comes on the texting side too If someone sends you a link via SMS Light will automatically detect it and send it to your email inbox so you can click it when you get back to your computer The Light Phone does not have a web browser If you’re surprised that the phone supports this many functions well that’s part of the nuance of this device It’s not some blunt force implement meant to divorce you from all digital distractions While endless feeds like social media and email and web browsers are outlawed calendars and notes calls and texts maps and that camera are fair game It’s a good balance I think So what’s it actually like to spend 2 weeks going light after 20 years being super heavy I documented the experience using another set of tools I haven’t used in years Finally I have a use for one of these notebooks which I thought might help me adapt to the slower pace I hope to achieve with light life And to be clear I did not carry a second phone during my time with this one I swapped my primary SIM into the Light Phone 3 Then I contacted about 30 friends and family to let them know that unless I was at a computer they would need to call or text me for quick replies Calls by the way sounded just fine on both earpiece and speaker phone and reception was good on T-Mobile 5G Though I wish the phone had a functional proximity sensor to turn the screen off when I put it to my ear The first thing this adventure illuminated is how busy the life I’ve built truly is Day one found me driving to the Jones Beach Air Show with the help of the directions app As a diehard Google Maps user I was skeptical about how well the hear maps navigation would do but it actually did a fine job of guiding me through the 50-minute road trip and several others during my time with it The Bluetooth link to the car was finicky at first But once connected my old music kept my spirits aloft until I made it to the beach to see some airplanes aloft And here to help tell my story I’ll start to pepper in some Lightphone 3 camera samples to give you a sense of life through its lenses [Music] Even confronted by that bone shaking spectacle of air power I couldn’t be truly present because I felt the nagging emptiness of a quiet phone I even started idly texting my friends just to prompt responses So ingrained was my need for notifications Later when I joined some of those friends in the city I realized I couldn’t check the boat schedule using the ferry app as usual nor could I buy virtual passes I needed to trudge down to the dock and look at the monitors to see if the boats were on time And then I needed to print paper tickets for my passage This was something I hadn’t consciously realized till now how many tickets and menus and links are hidden behind QR codes in 2025 which the Light phone doesn’t yet support Over the next 2 weeks I would find myself photographing my laptop screen before leaving the house to preserve those and other details I had to use cash or cards in lie of the mobile payments I’d grown to rely upon And when I hung out with my friends I would see their phones light up and ask them like a nosy nextdoor neighbor what those notifications were What was happening I don’t care if it’s Door Dash or Starbucks spam Clue me in I was starved for the welcome intrusion of an alert Fending for a hit in those first rough days Just want a little bit of internet Just a touch more dopamine Leave me alone I slowly started to get over that as I remembered a lesson more and more folks are talking about these days The boredom we’ve strived to avoid for decades is actually helpful My brain needs to be bored It’s why I have some of my most creative ideas in the shower One of the few places into which my phone doesn’t ordinarily intrude And the Light phone kind of made the world my shower I got so bored that I stumbled into new discoveries like how to finally set the calendar on my watch Not by googling but by trial and error And rather than relying on my Evernote cheat sheet to remember the names of people in my neighborhood I had to exercise my memory Sure I screwed up a couple of times but I hit more than I missed And the act of trying to remember exercised some muscles that felt long dormant in the depths of that memory And without the safety blanket diversion of a smartphone I gradually became more attuned to the world around me The sights the sounds the people the passage of time Of course sometimes the outside world brings you its own intrusions My offline time meant more chances to catch up with friends and neighbors one of whom told me about an unsettling addition to the [Music] neighborhood You know there used to be a sandwich shop here that didn’t make me feel an Eldrich lost like horror But this is also valid and real [Music] I’m terrified Let’s [Music] go No matter how good you get at it there’s an obvious inconvenient truth to this lifestyle Just because you’ve gone light doesn’t mean the world has With no telegram WhatsApp or signal I started to miss out on the impromptu social hangs that spontaneously arose When I did join and those hangs happened outside of ferry hours or beyond subway range I didn’t have an Uber or Lift app to get home nor could I use my phone to unlock a city bike And even zip cars require a reservation in advance usually made on the app So several times I found myself wandering the streets of Brooklyn for more than a half hour hunting down a yellow cab Also you’d think that only checking email and instant messages a few times a day would make you calmer right And maybe eventually it does but I never got there The lack of the unified inbox that the smartphone provides and the sheer number of messages meant my emails piled up My family group chats went on without me My to-do lists went unchecked My inability to fill those many daily micro moments of downtime with productive distractions like paying bills and booking haircuts made me stressed instead of relaxed And my fragile lightness began to crumble I should have been more intentional about it Of course I should only message start a message when I’m ready to finish it That is not the way my life works It is always a juggling act There’s always there’s always distractions and crap and stuff and stuff and stuff and I don’t like it but it’s the truth Now Light is a realistic company that understands the demands of the modern world So the Phone 3 includes a hotspot feature that I used so extensively the phone’s battery never lasted more than a full day The idea is that you carry a laptop with you when you know you’ll need more than the phone can offer And the added friction of having to sit down and open that computer will lead to your sessions becoming more intentional It’s just like back in the day You’re choosing to go online Welcome And then when you’re done choosing to go offline Goodbye But there are things like two-factor authentication ride sharing and public transit schedules that work better or only work at all in a mobile app which means I started carrying my iPad mini instead of a laptop And that broke the detox barrier in a much more destructive way It’s so easy to swipe from a temporary essential app to an intrusive temptation app and the next thing you know you’re back down the damn Instagram rabbit hole And yet I couldn’t help it Qualcomm’s 40th anniversary party the Nintendo Switch 2 media day picking up my mom at the airport scheduling rides for visiting friends booking restaurant reservations all of it required at least a moment on the iPad And the whirlwind weekend trip with my dad and uncle to Michigan to see the Soolocks took many such moments Tethered to the Light Phone 3’s 5G hotspot the iPad played a pivotal role in keeping us from getting completely lost in the upper peninsula and keeping us aware of our flight status and storing our steamship and rental car tickets and just a thousand other things And yet in the midst of this de facto failure there is a little reprieve because even at this early stage of my experiment the Light phone had already conditioned me to favor human interaction even when the iPad was available So instead of resorting to Apple Maps or even the Lightn’s own directory tool for restaurant recommendations in Lington and Sue St Marie we asked bartenders and baristas and other locals And when my dad paid a visit to a friend he’d not seen in over 50 years that friend’s address wasn’t even findable on Google Maps It was his homemade patiently texted turnbyturn directions that got us out to his far-flung plot of land in the countryside Sometimes the old ways are the best Now there were some objectively bad times While friction is essential to a digital detox the Light Phone 3 has too much of it in its current form The keyboard is insanely tough to type on Voice dictation isn’t much better and the UI is littered with bugs and limitations small ones like not being able to play or pause from your earbuds or deleting your preferred ringtone And big ones like the phone refusing to make an outbound call or text at the worst possible time when I was behind the wheel trying to pick up my mother at a crowded airport Now the light company is headquartered just down the road from me in New York So at the close of my experiment I paid them a visit to ask about those frustrations And what I found was a couple of co-founders who were already in the midst of fixing about 80% of the bugs I reported and who were in talks with partners to fill many of the other gaps I had found Ride sharing streaming music mobile payments QR codes third party messaging RCS the as yet unused fingerprint sensor It was all on their road map And they also told me about some solutions I didn’t know about a textbased service that calls an Uber for you among others And as they went into detail about the challenges of tackling these things while also getting carrier certification and dealing with tariffs and other distractions another company employee was in the back of the office doing repairs on some customers Light Phone 2 units 5 years after the release of that model light continues to sell and support it because the only thing Kai and Joe seem to detest more than endless feeds is planned obsolescence That’s one of the reasons the Light Phone 3 is so expensive relative to its capabilities It’s not just the fact that Light can’t realize many economies of scale and its component orders It’s the company’s goal to support the phone for 5 to 10 years And those services the voice dictation the maps provider the camera tuning the carrier testing the partners they’re engaging for keyboard and messaging upgrades they all cost money At the same time Light is saying no to easy revenue streams that would lead to its customers having their data sold for advertising or AI scraping It’s not my intention to carry water for light or to say that $800 isn’t a lot of money but I do get tired of seeing reductive reactions in the comments like “I could just do that with a $60 flip phone or I could just delete all my social apps.” Sure you could but it’s just as easy to reinstall those apps And a cheap flip phone is cheap in the bad ways too Say what you will about the Light Phone but you’ve got to give its makers credit for sticking to their principles over their decade in business Clearly the Light Phone is not the best fit for me personally since I’m not in a position to be able to walk away from as much of the internet as its lifestyle demands If I were to do another extended detox I think I’d be better served by the minimal phone which still lets you use all your usual apps and relies on the screen to make scrolling less palatable Keep in mind though that the minimal phone has its own bugs which I covered in my review and the company behind it is brand new and has yet to prove it can offer the same level of service and support as light So yeah to no one’s surprise Mr mobile couldn’t adopt the light life permanently And I do wonder how many people out there really have the ability to so thoroughly go dark on the go But as I return to my connected life with an admitted sigh of relief I’m doing it with a bolstered appreciation for boredom and presence and intentionality Those were just buzzwords to me before And if you think invoking them makes me sound like a Brooklyn hipster well so be it But this experience truly helped me better understand their worth and the destructive impact my smartphone has on all of it So maybe the Light Phone did make me just a bit lighter after this After This video was produced following two weeks okay 13 days with a production Lightphone 3 unit purchased by Mr Mobile and one extended interview at the light company in Brooklyn New York I don’t give the subjects of my reviews editorial input copy approval rights or even an early preview of my videos The out my Minimal Phone and Vortex V3 reviews on the channel for more in this vein And my next will be coming to you from Vivate 2025 in Paris Subscribe here time from Michael Fischer thanks for watching and stay mobile my friends [Music]