How the Light Phone 3 stays true to its minimalist roots despite new OLED and cameras
Key findings
- The Light Phone 3 comes closer to traditional smartphones with new features such as an OLED screen and cameras.
- The goal of Light is to provide more options in the smartphone market while focusing on reducing distractions.
- The company adheres to principles such as “no advertising,” “no endless feeds,” and “make sure actions on the phone have a clear end.”
Smartphones have long been touted as digital multifunction devices – screens that fit in your pocket and can handle whatever app you have open. This flexibility, combined with the truism that a phone is easier to use than a computer, has proven extremely popular. But somewhere along the line, smartphones also became the places where everything happens.
You may have heard the criticism before: They demand our attention with notifications, they waste our time with endless feeds, and they’ve changed the way we interact with people and ideas. Whether you agree or not, enough people feel weird about their relationship with their phone to do something about it—limit their use of the phone they already have, switch to a “dumbphone,” or get a different option entirely.
The Light Phone and the company behind it, Light, were introduced on Kickstarter in 2011 as the simplest, distraction-free second phone option. The Light Phone 2, released in 2019, took it a step further with an E Ink display and several simple apps like a music player and navigation. And with the Light Phone 3, Light takes the simplicity of its predecessor phones a step further, with a new display, removable battery, and for the first time, a built-in camera. Here’s how the company has handled these changes while keeping your attention and peace of mind.
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The Light Phone 3 is a further development of its predecessor
Getting closer to the traditional smartphone experience
Light / Pocket lint
The differences between the Light Phone 2 and Light Phone 3 are obvious when you look at them side by side. Light’s second phone, and the first that customers could use as their primary device, is tiny by 2024 phone standards.
It’s the size of a few credit cards stacked on top of each other, with a curved back and a 2.8-inch display that’s easy to reach with your thumb. Of course, it supports a 4G connection, text messaging and calling, and a limited number of apps, but it does all this through a simple, mostly text-based interface called Light OS.
The phone’s E Ink screen displays everything in black and white on the black model of the Light Phone 2, or in gray-black on the gray model. E Ink displays are inherently slower and more deliberate than the LCD or OLED screens you find on most smartphones. They take time to refresh, and sometimes they even show an afterimage of what they were displaying before — an effect called “ghosting.”
Light / Pocket lint
The tools currently available on the Light Phone 2: Alarm, Timer, Directions (turn-by-turn navigation), Directory (for looking up addresses), Music Player (with support for a playlist), Notes/Voice Memo and Podcasts.
The Light Phone 3, on the other hand, is boxy. It’s more wallet-sized, with prominent aluminum buttons (including its own shutter button), large grilles on the front for the speaker and microphone, and a larger, matte OLED display. The Light Phone 3 has more of the features of a traditional smartphone, although it wasn’t Light’s motivation to compete with the iPhone 15’s screens.
“When you zoom out, it’s probably not the type of display,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and co-founder of Light, tells me in a video call. “Technology wasn’t the main driver of what we were trying to achieve.” The goal of this third Light phone was to make the idea of being “light” understandable to more people.
“Many users just couldn’t get used to it, even our own investors couldn’t get used to the E Ink display,” says Tang. Switching to an OLED display, which is as matte and anti-glare as an E Ink display, was the solution. Not only did this make using the device less frustrating for anyone used to the speed and responsiveness of a regular smartphone, it also simplified the design features for Light OS, as Light’s software team didn’t have to adapt the display’s refresh rate and animations to E Ink.
However, Light has no plans to stop supporting the Light Phone 2. “We are not a fan of planned obsolescence,” says Tang. “We will support all the products we develop until nobody wants them anymore.” The company plans to transfer every new software feature added to the Light Phone 3 to the Light Phone 2, hardware permitting.
The point of a third light phone is to offer more options. “It’s like different shoes or different cars. You choose the right tool for the job,” says Tang. The Light Phone 3 can do more right out of the box, but it’s still not as time-consuming as a traditional smartphone. It’s just a small step forward in capability from the utilitarianism of the Light Phone 2 – more Blackberry than the Nokia of the Light Phone 2, rather than the giant leap forward of the iPhone.
A camera inspired by point-and-shoot cameras
Light / Pocket lint
Besides the display, it’s the cameras that make the Light Phone 3 more attractive to the average smartphone user. Light didn’t make the decision to add cameras without serious consideration.
“We don’t have a camera on the Light Phone 2 because we felt the activity around cameras was so distracting,” Tang says. “The posting, the commenting, you take a photo and start checking it… I think that’s a distraction.”
But that doesn’t change the fact that people love taking photos, and it’s handy to be able to document a moment. Light sees the cameras (front and rear) on the Light Phone 3 as a “tool to document a moment.” They’re for documenting things you want to keep, like a receipt, and sharing images of something important, like a video of you and your kids, directly with your friends and family. No feeds, no comments, and no network effects. Light isn’t even sure it wants some kind of gallery for viewing photos and videos on the Light Phone 3.
“We’re still considering whether or not we want to create some sort of gallery,” Tang says. “Maybe with a limitation, like 24 hours or so, for you to view, but that’s not yet decided.” Whatever happens, the company plans to make everything you capture available on its web dashboard, where you currently manage things like your RSS feeds for Light OS’s podcast tool.
And in case it wasn’t already obvious from the dedicated shutter button, the big inspiration for the camera isn’t the processing power of a device like the Pixel 9. “We’re not going to make it fancy and try to do a lot of software optimization. It’s going to be just like your point-and-shoot camera,” Tang says.
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Every action should have a clear beginning and a clear end
The analogy that Tang kept coming back to during our conversation was that of a hammer. A smartphone is a hammer – you can use it to do a specific task and then you disappear with it.
The fact is that a smartphone can do multiple things, but that doesn’t mean it should consume your attention. Light “prides itself on being a radically different technology company that doesn’t profit from user engagement,” Tang says.
To describe in more detail how the company thinks about its products, Tang cited these principles: “We have the number one overarching principle – no advertising. Number two – no endless feeds, nothing to browse, nothing to ‘discover.’ And number three – the user’s action has a clear end.” Tang cited getting directions as an example. You can launch the navigation tool and get directions. Once you get to the desired location, the phone turns off. There are no other apps to check, not even obvious map locations to click on or be drawn to.
As long as the features meet these basic criteria, be it new software for Light OS or hardware for the next phone, Light can safely consider them. The same considerations applied to the cameras and a currently unused piece of hardware – an NFC antenna. Light hasn’t built it yet, but the company is planning a “future payment tool” so you can go out and about with the Light Phone 3 without your wallet.
The action performed by users has a clear end.
Overall, Light believes it has still struck the right balance between improving the usability of phones and sticking to its principles. It helps that in recent years some parts of the public have identified the same kind of fear of using phones that Light was founded on.
“If you develop a product based on a technological breakthrough and forget about us, our feelings, our goals and our well-being, people will rebel against it,” says Tang. “Every year, more conversations, more press and more people joining us confirm this theory.” And as reports have shown, the trend of changing our attitudes toward mobile phones has not only been driven by people who grew up without them. “The most surprising thing to me was that most of our users are young, between 20 and 35 years old,” says Tang.
“The new generation, born with smartphones, social media and the internet, seems to have an easier time saying, ‘OK, this TikTok thing makes me feel awful,'” Tang says. Caring about what you do and don’t do on your phone isn’t a bad thing. “You want something that’s curated and meaningful,” Tang says. The hope is that the Light Phone 3 will make it easier for people to make more of those meaningful choices — or at least think more about the phone they already have.
