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The Light Phone 2

2023-06-21

I was delighted to receive The Light Phone 2 last week.

They absolutely nailed the feel of this thing in the palm. It's beautifully sized, contoured, and weighted. Unlike an iPhone the front glass panel is textured and feels great on the fingertips. It essentially doesn't exist in my pocket; I can't feel it.

As you'd expect with an e-ink display, response times are slow and there is a lot of flickering as the display erases itself between screens. There is a vibration when you touch the screen (aka "haptic feedback") to let you know that your touch was registered, which alleviates some of the pain with the slow screen response. I believe that they did the best they could with the technology they are working with.

Typing a text message is more tedious than a full-sized smartphone, but less tedious than the NUU F4L flip phone. You're not supposed to be slinging out texts or novels on this thing anyways. I'm impressed with what they achieved with the keyboard on such a small screen.

I tried using the 0.25 amp micro-USB charger that came with the NUU F4L which doesn't seem to be enough for the Light Phone; it gets stuck in a boot loop when I plug it in. 500 milliamps or more does the job.

Sound and call quality is good. The microphone picks up your voice despite being quite a distance from your mouth (this was a major source of frustration with the NUU F4L). I believe the ringtones and notification sounds are custom and many are unique and pleasant.

A few disappointments

I tried setting up a Light account to get access to additional tools like music, podcasts, navigation, and notes. I understand why they designed it this way: the interface is just too small to handle a lot of smartphone-esque tasks like settings menus and complex UIs. My problem is that I don't want to sync all my contacts and notes with their server. I do trust them personally to not do anything evil, but being a small company that depends on third parties to provide their services, I don't trust the full supply chain of vendors to maintain adequate security. I also didn't see anything about syncing contacts in their privacy policy, so I have to assume the worst (unencrypted on their end). So for now I'm going without a Light account; only Phone and Alarm are available. There is still a "Sync Contacts" option in settings but it's unclear if that does anything without an account.

I really wish the Calculator and Music apps could be enabled without an account. It's a shame that the phone's Android base doesn't provide filesystem access over USB. It would be really nice to just drop some MP3s on there without uploading them somewhere.

Conclusion

The Light Phone 2 does an absolutely amazing job at what it was designed to do: discourage unhealthy phone use. Unless I receive a call or text, I have no reason to touch it; there's just nothing to do on it. Because of its smoothness and lightness I also don't even notice its presence. Even if it's not my ideal pocket communicator, it's extremely well-done. Battery life is great because it gets barely used by its own nature.

As for the price, I happen to know that they're not raking in obscene profits on the sale of each device. These things are expensive to make and they are not subsidizing it by selling out your habits and personal information. I think that it's easy to dismiss it as overpriced if you're comparing bullet points, but there's something very valuable, if hard to quantify, about the mental freedom that a distractionless device can provide.