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Light Phone 2 — Beautiful phone designed to be used as little as possible
The Light Phone 2 is a 4G phone with a beautiful black & white matte E-ink display. It's a more reliable, durable, and practical phone, now featuring essential tools like messaging, an alarm clock, the ability to get a ride-share home or a list of simple directions. All so you can leave your smartphone behind more often.
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Replies
David Sulitzer
I absolutely LOVE this...and yet I’ll never get it. Because either I can’t risk not having a camera on me anymore or if I really decide to go without I’ll go even more minimal and leave the house with a cellular Apple Watch + AirPods.
Maybe this needs an Apple Watch app to receive notifications for non-cellular Watch owners (but that base will shrink in the next few years) or bundle it with a tiny camera!
Or maybe I’m wrong and a smart watch will actually make people more likely to leave the fully featured phone at home and get yours as a minimal screen to have just in case 🤷🏻♂️
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@nivo0o0 Since this isn't being delivered until (optimistically) April 2019, shouldn't this be marked as a Pre-Order?
You got my hopes up and now they've fallen again.
I've been wanting exactly this as a "detox" weekend phone. I'm constantly on backlit screens and bombarded with notifications. I'm looking for a simple, yet beautiful detox phone that's around $100. Oh, I just saw the price on Indiegogo and it's a bit pricey at $400! :\
The need for tools to live a more digitally minimal life is becoming more acute each year. I have already last year disabled all notifications on all devices and removed social media apps from my phone. These have been first aid to my addictive phone usage and light phone 2 could be the next step. Adding bluetooth to the final configuration much welcome move.
@walark Hi Walid! We wish we could offer the phone at a lower price point but being a small team designing custom/bespoke hardware and software makes it difficult to compete with tech giants who can leverage existing infrastructure and economies of scale to produce extremely inexpensive tech.
@walark I mean, compared to a $1,000 smartphone, it is a quarter of the price... though it offers less than a quarter of the solutions.
@walark @joehollier Why not partner with one of the larger Chinese brands who have the purchasing power and distribution reach to make this a success. That will allow you to focus on software and bring the costs *way* down (It needs to be 150 euro - 200 dollars make)
@joehollier Hi Joe! I understand your point. Don't get me wrong, the phone is very appealing and i really like it, but still not convinced about your pricing strategy. A 400$ basic/minimalist phone is a bit over the top. (IMHO)
@rubes_world A 1k phone is at then end of the price spectrum. You can have a decent phone for 200-300$.
I find it funny how this is called Light Phone but with the eInk display I can't use it in the dark.
@hustlinhack Hey Kyle! We totally see where you're coming from but we actually plan on integrating a backlight so the phone can be used in all situations :)
This is such a beautiful product! but it's too expensive, especially for me in India. All the best nevertheless. I wish I had bought this.
@androidlove this doesn't solve a problem that's specific to the 1%, nor is it priced beyond the means of a lot of people (assuming they value their own mental health).
However, it does appear to solve a problem that only a particular type of people are acutely aware of. I think that will change in the future as phones get mashed even further into our eyeballs.
@a12rj Here's a list of our projected three models of Light Phone 2 - thelightphone.com/4gcoverage - hope that is helpful!
@joehollier I'm curious about the decision to drop shipping a SIM with the Light Phone 2. From what I read about the first Light Phone launch, it had its own SIM card and maintained your smartphone number. I have Verizon, which does not allow duplicate SIMs, so it is pretty much out of the question to buy a whole secondary phone plan specifically for the Light Phone 2. Really like the concept though.
@eric_miller Hi Eric, thanks for checking it out. I completely see where you are coming from. We do actually plan to offer a few SIM options to LP2 users, which will be sharing in a few months time as we learn a little bit more about our users so we can tailor the plans and development to meet their needs. We are considering still offering the call forwarding/masking platform, the biggest hurdle for us was that it is currently not possible to forward/mask messages so the experience would be pretty confusing as it stands and we felt that it would make more sense to launch the campaign as unlocked phone and to over the next few months offer a variety of options for different ways to integrate it into your lifestyle. I will also admit, that we were never able to bring that platform internationally and in speaking with those users, the lack of same number was actually way less of a hurdle than we initially anticipated. People sometimes enjoyed have a second 'light' number. You can still call forward to it, and set up an auto-reply with a link to text your new light number perhaps, or just share that light number with closest friends and family. Obviously it's not seamless, but I guess my point is just that it wasn't a deal breaker for everyone. Also, although Verizon may not have such a feature yet, I'm pretty sure they have been working on one for a while to compete with the ATT NUmber Sync and TMobile Digits platforms. As smartwatches with SIMs and IPads with SIMs become more popular, users will expect that feature and only the carriers are able to solve it in a fully seamless way. The final side of the picture is that our speciality is in hardware and UX, the cloud platform was an ambitious task that delayed our launch by 6 months initially and in a way we want to focus on what we know how to do best. Hope some of that makes sense!
@joehollier Thanks for the response Joe! You make a great point, I suppose I could actually setup a Google Voice number for LP2... I'll have to look into Verizon more if they've got some new stuff brewing for secondary SIMs. That actually makes a pretty great case for picking up a LP2 as a secondary phone akin to owning an apple watch w/ cellular. I personally would find the LP2 more useful and beneficial than apple watch. :) 🙌
I enjoy the intent, as I already don’t use notifications, etc.; but I think it’s misguided not to include a few more basic functions. I’m aware of feature creep, but no documents at all? I’m not going to bring this and an e-reader to the beach, say. I would buy one (when it’s actually a real product) if it included basic e-reader functionality.
Wow! This is stellar and comes in perfect timing! I just cracked my thousandth (more like 5th) phone and I blame that it is because I am on it too much. This would be perfect. Just #need WhatsApp capability for it to be a real purchase for me. Is that looking possible?