The Light Phone – Back to the Lost Era
With a very simple but an extremely powerful aim, Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, created The Light Phone. In order to pave a ‘way for people to find balance with their connectedness’, together they came about this concept of a phone that would be used as little as possible.
The Light Phone is one which is not like any other smartphone you have seen or used before. In fact, it isn’t a smartphone at all. It is a $100 credit card sized phone, which lasts 20 days on a single charge and does nothing except making and answering calls and texts. There is no browser. There are no games. But it does have quick dialing and also serves as a flashlight. That’s about it.
Your phone away from phone, the Light Phone is designed to be used as little as possible
- It has a simple contact setup without any of the usual frills that you have in any other phone. Ten numbers can be held in the memory for speed dialing.
- It is slim, weighs just 36.5g and is compact (3.4 inches x 2.0 inches). The Light functions along with your existing phone.
- Basically, it is a pre-paid GSM cellphone which works independent of your carrier.
- It comes pre-loaded with 500 minutes, a SIM card, and an app to use with your existing phone.
- It is a great backup phone as it uses its own phone number.
- It can be used as an extension of your other phone. With the aid of the Light app, you can forward the calls you want to receive from your existing number.
- The display on the Light Phone is dot matrix LED which lights up, so you can view it in the dark.
Why buy a phone which is stripped of every amazing feature of a smartphone? Here is why. The aim is pretty obvious that the owners of the Light Phone will not be checking their phones obsessively creating a gulf in real-time communication. The makers of the phone are not against technology or its progress, but as they revealed on a site, they wanted to put the human back into technology. They maintain that with the splurge of smartphones available, people have lost contact with each other on the basic level.
This phone allows you to look around you. Speak to people sitting next to you. And enjoy the world in all its brilliance. It aims at directing the attention of people to their surroundings while still having a phone which can be used when necessary only. There are no emails. No browsing. No chatting. No checking out Facebook and Twitter. Only phone calls and text messages are visible, when required only. And also, because it’s so basic (although in a good way) it will never need to be replaced.
If you’re interested in the Light Phone, it might be a while before you get your hands on one. It is said to begin shipping sometime around June 2016.
Keval Padia is the founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing mobile app development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lures him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.