This phone is different from every other phone in existence

folarin okunola

May 20, 2015 10:43 PM

This phone is thin, light, lasts 20 days on a single charge, and best of all costs only $100.

The Light Phone

Are you wondering if there is a phone that is an exact opposite of every other phone in existence? Well, now there is one – the Light Phone.

The phone does nothing except lets you put in a sim card, press a few buttons and make a call. There is no browser, no games, no NFC, has quick dial and also doubles as a flashlight. That is all. No OS or fancy apps or anything like that.

Creators of the phone, Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, created the phone at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator in New York.

They both come from a background in design and Kaiwei has a background of over 10 years in building phones.

“We started building this because it became very clear that true happiness means being present. This has been written about by so many of the smartest minds since Seneca. So much of our days are spent connected and staring at screens that we are losing that presence in so many situations. We built the Light Phone as a way for people to find balance with their connectedness. It’s not that we think people should never connect again, it’s just that taking a break is extremely healthy in every sense of the word,” said Hollier.

The ultimate goal is to use the phone as little as possible. The phone offers 500 minutes of prepaid talk time and it charges through USB, but the larger idea is for you to pull it out, make a call, and put it back. They plan on shipping sometime in May 2016.

Another amazing thing, and get this, is that the phone will never need to be replaced because it’s so basic (in a good way).

“This phone will likely never need to be replaced by a new model,” said Hollier. “This project is really about a conversation we want to start. Is where technology is going really the way we want in terms of living our day to day lives in the happiest sense? We are not against tech at all (clearly we joined an incubator and have a passion for this) but we think that maybe we need to put the human first in tech again and think about what kind of tech will make our lives better in the long term. I don’t think the Light Phone is the end all be all answer to this question but it’s our first step in starting the conversation and we have lots of ideas for going forward.”

folarin okunola