Background

Your mileage may vary, and so may your reasons for wanting The Light Phone in the first place. If you don't relate to the following, my notes on The Light Phone may not be relevant to you.

I bought mine primarily for:

• aesthetics
• minimalism, when I can afford the luxury of minimalism (this is my main sticking point)
• to lighten my load while walking around

I don't like the feeling that I can't leave my house (or do many things inside my house) without a little computer on me that cost nearly $1,000.

I did not buy The Light Phone for the benefits showcased in its marketing, notably:

• to detox from social media
• as an antidote for modern digital attention deficit
• to correct for input overload.

I groom my notification settings carefully and keep disruptions to a minimum. I use Instagram the same way I sit down to watch a TV show: deliberate, limited time wasting for relaxation.

In other words, The Light Phone appeals to me because it seems like a straight line from the original Macintosh to cell phones, and not because I think it's a solution for my loneliness and distraction.

So here's what it's been like to use it off and on for a year:

Experience

I received my Light Phone February 23, 2023 and put it into service immediately. Some limitations I anticipated:

• Fidgety transition between primary iPhone and The Light Phone, which I always thought of as more of a recreational phone.
  • Having to swap my SIM card between devices, only after:
  • disabling iMessage on my iPhone and
  • alerting my main group iMessage friends that they'd have to reach me exclusively at my phone number, possibly by starting a new group thread.
• Having to carry my wallet more often
• And a keycard for my Tesla (I know, sorry)
• etc., etc.

Positives

I always loved the aesthetic of Light Phone when using it. I liked the sounds and the display. Some of my gripes with the UI (e.g. placement of the send button when typing text messages) were solved with software updates.

Also, Light Phone is truly a great conversation piece. I anticipated this to some degree but was surprised how far it took me into group reflections on the impact of always-on Internet access. This may be the sleeper hit of The Light Phone: It invites groups of adults to talk about their need to be less "connected" in service of connecting more with one another on a human level.

For that, I'll always appreciate projects like The Light Phone and its peers.

Negatives

• missed calls and texts due to quiet ringer
• short battery life
  • YMMV; I bought my unit used and the seller only disclosed after the sale that he wasn't the first owner, either
• typing on an e-ink screen just sucks, no matter how much you love e-ink screens. the iPhone has been spoiling me us on capacitive touchscreen responsiveness for 14 years.

But the biggest problems I had with The Light Phone were similar to what others have reported here: Using my Light Phone comes at the expense of a smartphone's indispensable killer functions:

• GTD task management (for me, that happens in Things)
• Rapidly capturing information in my life's one inbox (this too is a GTD thing, and for me, it happens in Drafts)
• Calendaring (I love Light Phone's calendar, but it's not up to the job of managing an appointment-based business and a family of four)
• Camera
  • capturing stills and videos of those fleeting moments i cherish later, especially but not exclusively of my kids
  • capturing everything else important: Broken appliances, information printed in the real world, scanning QR codes, scanning handwritten notes and kid art, etc., etc., etc. This is huge.
• NFC payments (Apple Pay)
  • now that this tech has finally caught on, I use this for most transactions
• public transit
  • Navigation (shoutout to Transit!)
  • My fare card is saved to my phone's wallet and doesn't exist in another form anywhere else
• Flashlight
  • Dude.
• Playing music to speakers in my house
  • So much joy here. I even use my phone to manage speaker levels when playing vinyl through my Sonos.
• Joyful photos review
  • My kids' lives, available for sentimental review at a moments' notice. How is that unhealthy?
• Genuine, relationship-enhancing social interactions
  • video calls
  • playful iMessage features my friends and family enjoy using
• Remote controlling my Tesla
  • I realize I'm in serious White Whine territory here, but for better or worse the experience of using my car is far worse without a smartphone.
• Remote controlling my thermostat when traveling or approaching home
  • I can live without this, but I live better with it.
• Controlling my Ember mug for warming up cold coffee without ruining it (shut up, it was a gift)
  • See thermostat note.

The hoops I found myself jumping through to replace even the simplest of these utilities felt silly at best and difficult or wasteful at worst:

• Buying extra flashlights to deploy around my home and car
• Being screwed without my wallet
• Making it harder to run my business
• Writing things down in notebooks (cool!) and not being able to find the notes later (useless)
• Missing FaceTime calls
• Missing regular calls
• Being harder for my friends and family to reach (kind of defeats the purpose of anything called a "phone")
• Driving my car with a cold battery is less energy efficient
• No music streaming is fine now and then, but most of the time?

In conclusion, I love the Light Phone's concept and ethos to death. I even hope to find a role for it in my life again. But right now, it just creates too much friction.