Can the Light Phone III prevent “brain rot”?

Dear reader, I have a confession: I suffer from the illness that young people call “Brain corruption” Things I can’t think deeply after scrolling too much on my phone. It’s difficult to complete a book these days.

Many people have this problem. Many have created a category of minimalist tech products that strive to eliminate us to be distracted, from AI pins, the artificially intelligent lapel pins that take notes to phones that only have basic features.

The latest example, $600 Light Phone IIIa peeled mobile phone that does little from a Brooklyn startup. The latest version, which began shipping in March and has been set to a wider release in July, can call, text, take photos, view map instructions, play music and podcasts, and many others can’t.

There is no web browser. Also, there is no app store. That means there are no Ubers who welcome rides, slacks, or social media. There’s no even an email.

“When you use it when you need it and turn it back on, it goes away in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, chief executive of Light, a startup that has developed multiple iterations of light phones over the past nine years. “We tell many customers that they feel less stressed, they become more productive and creative.”

I used it as my main phone for a week, because I wanted to know if a light phone can cure me brain rot. There was a moment when I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to stare at the phone screen while I was waiting for the train, resting at the gym or eating alone. The phone sounded wonderful and clear. The Maps app did an amazing job navigating me around town.

It reminded me of a simple time when we mostly used our phones for Converse before we put them away to focus on other tasks.

But for a week, the flaws of the stupid phone call were lacking in my enjoyment. I suddenly realized I couldn’t enter the station. We looked up the names of our new restaurants and controlled the garage doors.

Part of it has nothing to do with the light phone itself, which is a decent product, but how society as a whole relies on advanced smartphone capabilities.

This is how my week ran errands, commute, and went out on Lower Technology phones.

Get started

When I set up a light phone review unit over the weekend, the phone, which looked like a black rectangular slab, was quite bare bones. The phone’s menu was a black screen showing a white text list for mobile phones, cameras, photo albums and alarm functions. To add more tools, I had to access the dashboard using a web browser on my computer. There, we were able to install features such as the map app, notepad, and timers.

I was ready to go, so I decided to live without my iPhone for at least a while.

I’m commuting

On Monday morning, I took the train from Oakland, California to San Francisco and started commuting. When I arrived at the station I realized that I couldn’t get in without an iPhone. This is because many years ago, I had converted my physical transit pass, Clipper cards, into virtual cards stored in my smartphone’s mobile wallet.

The light phone didn’t have a mobile wallet to load a virtual transit card, so I went back home badly to get my iPhone and eventually showed up in the office 30 minutes late.

Go to the gym

One night, I got a similar hit at a rock climbing gym. To enter, members use their mobile phones to log in to the gym website and generate a temporary barcode that is scanned at the entrance. The light phone didn’t have a web browser and could not create a barcode, so we had to wait in line at the front desk.

Text a friend and take photos

I added some of my closest friends to my address book over a light phone and texted them explaining my experiment. When I typed the device’s keyboard, some felt slow as there was no auto-correct feature to fix typos. As a result, the conversation was concise.

The cheer continued as I sent pictures of people. The unlit and grainy image appeared to have been created with telephone cameras for at least 15 years.

“Retro!” said one friend in response to a blurry photo of my daughter.

“Wow, that’s bad,” another friend said of the dimly lit photo of my corgi Max.

The founders of Light said they are proud of the Light Phone camera, which has a nostalgic feel to it.

I’m running errands

One afternoon I had to drop off Amazon’s return at the UPS store. We have selected the most convenient shipping options, including displaying QR codes for scanning.

problem? Light phones didn’t have an email app or web browser to download codes. Instead, I loaded it onto my computer screen and snapped mediocre photos on my phone.

When I brought the package to UPS and presented the photos, I held my breath and hoping the image was clear enough. UPS employees kept the scanner and after three attempts they heard beeps and transport labels printed.

Not only is it a relief, but how troublesome.

lunch

Another afternoon my wife and I went out for an improvised lunch. I had to back out the car and ask my wife to use her iPhone to close the garage door with the app myq. (Our physical garage door opener stopped working years ago.)

After that, I was trying to remember the name of a new sushi restaurant I read recently on my food blog. It was inevitable that I would dig deeper into my blog posts on a light phone. In the end we speculated and went to the wrong restaurant. However, it was good to have lunch together without the temptation to check my email.

Conclusion

I admire the goal of light phones, but my experience shows that there is nothing realistically possible or can buy to bring us back to a simpler era. Many aspects of our lives revolve around highly capable smartphones, travelling around town, working, paying for things, dominating home appliances.

This light cell phone experiment reminded me of glamping.

I can’t think of many people who make them work to make light phones realistically use only their mobile phones. Many of us rely on tools like Slack and email to communicate.

A light phone may be a good choice for unplugging while you’re off work, as a secondary leisure phone similar to a weekend car. But even so, camera quality may be a contract breaker for some.

Light’s CEO Tang admitted that Light Shone is not for everyone, but added that parents are considering buying a mobile phone for their children not distracted at school. The company is also working on adding more tools, including the ability to request mobile payments and Lyft cars.