Light Phone 2 – Back To Basics

Do you exhibit the following symptoms: frequent phone checking? Notification withdrawals? Extended timeline scrolling? Excessive in-app purchases? Sore thumb joints? If you answered yes to one or more of the above, then perhaps you have a phone addiction.

Without being facetious, the smartphone has undoubtedly revolutionised and streamlined our day-to-day processes. Internet banking, booking movie tickets, Uber… it just makes things so much easier. However, the sheer fact we have the power of the internet in the palm of our hands means that the propensity to abuse that power becomes so tempting.

Introducing Light Phone 2. Described by the company as a “dumb phone”, the Light Phone 2 is designed to only provide the essentials and cut out the excess – no games and no social media. The word ‘minimalist’ gets thrown about quite often in the tech world, but the Light Phone takes the concept seriously.

Creators Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang met at a Google incubator where they worked as app designers. While deep in app research, they came to a digital epiphany of sorts and realised that the world needed less gormless faces glued to screens and more people living in the moment.

Light Phone 2 builds upon the foundation of its predecessor, the Light Phone, and its ability to only make and receive phone calls. The Light Phone 2 sends and receives calls and texts, tells the time, has an alarm clock, a headphone jack and provides directions. That’s it.

The Light Phone 2’s stripped back approach doesn’t just extend to its function, but also to its form. Rather than scorching your retinas with a regular LED or OLED display, the Light Phone 2 uses the same E-Ink technology you’d find with Kindle, and, to strip it back even further, there are only two colour options: black or white.

“Disconnecting is profound in a time when we have become so accustomed to our existence only through hyper-connectivity,” Hollier and Tang say on the Light Phone 2’s Indiegogo page.

This is the first time any Light Phone will be available in New Zealand. Light Phone 2’s predecessor was only 2G compatible, however, the new model is 4G/LTE compatible, making it ready to use all over the world, including in New Zealand.

The black and white matte screen makes the Light Phone 2 the most visible phone for outdoors while being incredibly energy efficient.