Unplug with the Light Phone from Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang
The Light Phone was made to be the intelligently-designed “dumb” supplement to your hyperactive smart phone. This is a minimalist credit card-sized device stripped down to the essentials: receiving and making calls without the clutter of apps or constant notifications. Although calls are forwarded from your smartphone, the Light Phone was designed to be used as infrequently as possible, offering the peace of mind in staying reachable without the pressure of always staying connected.
Even when you’re trying to separate yourself from your phone, checking just one message can send you into a k-hole of Wikipedia articles and Twitter posts that you crawl out of hours later. The Light Phone removes this risk, allowing you to be more mindful about how you spend your valuable time. It’s a remarkably simple accessory, essentially a small rectangle with a buttonless LED keypad and an illuminated single-row display. There is no Bluetooth or texting capability and requires only an active SIM card.
Creators Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Teng created the Light Phone in response to what they perceived as our culture’s burgeoning smartphone addiction and the smartphones that “are engineered to keep us hooked.” Though our smartphones are a useful tool in many contexts, they’ve also become “our invisible crutch” and “we find ourselves reaching for them without thinking.” Even the enhanced productivity smartphones purport themselves to promote comes to a point of diminishing ends when you find yourself scrolling without finding any real joy from the content you’re consuming.
The Light Phone was built under the premise that a lunch with friends or a luxurious night out should be lived without a person having to interrupt their experience for something as small as an email from the Whole Foods newsletter. It encourages its users to slow down and appreciate the world outside of their phone’s perimeter.
Order a Light Phone ($150) here.
