Light Phone II: Price, Specs, Release Date

For half a year, Joe Hollier has been living without a phone. At least, without anything you’d recognize as a phone. He carries around a pocketable device, the color of graphite, that makes calls and sends text messages and does little else. To see it in his hand, or pressed up to his ear, looks as much like using a phone as pretending to call Pizza Hut with a ripe banana.

Hollier, an artist and designer, created the first version of this device in 2015, with fellow designer Kaiwei Tang. The Light Phone, back then, was meant to be your “phone away from phone.” For the jaunt upstate when you’d really rather not check your email. For the family vacation when everyone you need is there IRL. For days, or even a few blissful hours, when you need a break from your always-on, attention-stealing, dopamine-overload smartphone. It didn’t look like a phone because it wasn’t supposed to be one. More like a cell connection in case of emergencies, or a pager.

The Light Phone promised a reprieve from the travails of modern technology, if only temporarily. But with a limited address book of nine numbers and the singular ability to make phone calls, this was never going to become your permanent phone. Now Tang and Hollier hope to change that, by offering the next thing: Light Phone II.

This second version of the Light Phone—the one Hollier has been dogfooding since early this year—is meant to unleash you from you smartphone, forever. To make that possible, it comes with a few new tricks: text messaging, an unlimited address book, faster connectivity speeds, and a dashboard where new features will flow onto the handset in future updates. It ships to Indiegogo backers today, and will go on sale to everyone else for a cool $350.

Does that sound like a lot to pay for a device that does, well, almost nothing? Consider that to be the point.

“The value of Light Phone is not just the object itself,” says Tang. “The value is the experience that you break away from the internet, from social media, from all the manipulation. You’re free now. This is your life. What are you going to do?”

Let There Be Light

Tang and Hollier met in 2014, at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator program in New York, which encourages attendees to develop and launch a product or company in just seven months. The blonde and baby-faced Hollier and the dark-haired and bearded Tang gravitated toward each other right away with a shared understanding that, during their 30 weeks, they would not be building the next great app. Instead, they would build an escape hatch.

Light

Hollier, in particular, felt that his relationship with technology was broken. He recalled the internet of his childhood, when he’d wait 10 minutes for the modem to connect on the computer in his mom’s study. There, he was online. It was contained, finite. When he left the study, to hang out with friends or hit the pool on a nice summer’s day, he was no longer online. He’d set an away message and tell people where to find him.

Hollier wanted to build something which would bring back the duality of being online when you wanted to be, and just being yourself the rest of the time. Tang, who has a background building mobile phones for companies like Motorola, Nokia, and BlackBerry, agreed that the solution might lie in another phone. Just not one that behaved like the phones we’ve come to know. Something more like a dial-up device for the age of the smartphone.

The original Light Phone was small, barely bigger than a credit card, with a light-up dial pad that made the handset look like a calculator. Tang and Hollier are both designers, and the first thing they agreed on is that they should not crib from conventional phone design. A phone is a thing that makes us anxious, something we reach for like a nervous tick. Some research suggests that just seeing one on a table—face down, turned off—makes us distracted and unhappy. So no, this wouldn’t be a phone, not the kind you’re used to. This would be, as Tang likes to call it, a “tool.”

Tang and Hollier blueprinted it in the incubator, then launched it on Kickstarter in June of 2015. It wasn’t designed to be a consumer product so much as an experiment. “We were not trying to compete with any smartphone when we started,” says Tang. It was more like an artistic statement: Look at how anxious you are without your phone.

Its backers on Kickstarter didn’t see it that way. Light Phone raised $400,000 and sold 15,000 units, at $150 each, before Tang and Hollier put a stop on orders. Another 50,000 people joined a waitlist to get their hands on one, while the secondary market for used Light Phones saw them going for triple the original price.

Less Is More

The Light Phone’s surprise success proved to its creators that people weren’t as interested in what this new gadget could do, but what it couldn’t. “Everyone was habitually overwhelmed and craving escape,” says Hollier. People told him that the Light Phone made them feel less stressed, or that it made them feel better about giving a phone to their kids.

He and Tang also heard that people couldn’t “go light” for as long as they’d like to because of the phone’s limitations. It’s hard to give up a smartphone when that means giving up Uber and Lyft, listening to music, and text messaging. Plus, the Light Phone could only store nine phone numbers in its address book.

Adding a bunch of new features would made the Light Phone very heavy, more like a dumbed-down smartphone than their artistic invention. But Tang and Hollier sympathized with the idea that people wanted to ditch their smartphones for good. So they set out to build something new—something that Tang says isn’t meant to be a temporary escape from your smartphone, but a permanent one.

The Light Phone II doesn’t come with many new capabilities out of the box. It now offers text messaging and an alarm clock, and you can import your entire address book. This new version supports 4G connectivity—an upgrade from the 2G Light Phone—and it has a new e-ink screen. But the dream is to design an entirely new operating system, where Light Phone II owners can download a selection of apps from an online dashboard. Ridesharing, turn-by-turn directions, and a find-my-phone feature are all in the works. “We have some pretty strong philosophical guidelines for how we build them,” says Hollier. “We don’t want anything that can be infinite. Everything has to have a clear intention. With ridesharing, it’s like, I’m trying to get to this destination. Everything on the phone should be there for a clear reason. No email, no news.”

Tang and Hollier aren’t quite sure when those new features will land, though they say it will be soon. Even without them, though, people can’t seem to get enough of the idea. The project launched on Indiegogo in March 2018 and raised over $3.5 million from backers, $600,000 of which came in on the very first day.

Light Buzz

With its second product, Light has grown more serious as a company. This isn’t just Tang and Hollier’s little art project anymore. It’s a proper startup, with $8.4 million in seed funding from serious investors like Foxconn and Hinge Capital, in addition to the money it raised from its crowdfunders. Everyone know there’s a market for people who want to lighten up. The question is how much people are willing to give up to do it.

The Light Phone II is more of a bridge to modern technology than its predecessor, and will be even more so when you can use it to hail a car or get directions. But using one requires some humility. The miniature keyboard on the e-ink screen is cramped and difficult to type on. This is not a phone for long conversational volleys or for animated group threads. The messaging interface can take a while to load, distorting texts into cryptic pixels. Emoji, while supported, often populate as Frankensteinesque shapes.

So using the Light Phone II is more than just cosigning the philosophy that smartphones make us anxious, absorb our attention, turn us into people we don’t want to be. It demands a nearly sanctimonious dedication to avoiding that—even if it means you will text your friends less, take a while to reply to emails (whether social or work-related), miss out on the things your family posts on social media. Hollie says his many months with the Light Phone II have helped him reclaim his attention, his creativity. He didn’t say that the Light Phone II may have dramatically changed, for better or for worse, some of his social interactions.

Still, the option to blissfully ignore the damage from our smartphones seems increasingly unreasonable. It’s no longer just an anecdotal experience of techno-anxiety—even the phonemakers, like Apple and Google, know what they’re doing to us.

“Five years ago, the conversation was a lot different,” says Hollier. “A lot of people had just gotten a smartphone and were like, ‘What are you talking about? I love this thing!’ Then five years later, it’s like, oh my God. I can’t put this thing down.”

Maybe the Light Phone II is the kind of wakeup call we need. Not the perfect solution, but the perfect demonstration of the problem. We could all stand to lighten up a bit. Just maybe with a slightly bigger keyboard.

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