Just last night, I was playing ping pong with my youngest daughter and thinking,
"Man, I need to put away the phone more often and just spend one-on-one time."
So, imagine my surprise when I come into the office today and I'm unboxing a
product that is designed for just that, the Light Phone 3. It's a phone, it's an
alarm, directions, calendar, notes, settings, and nothing else. Okay,
there's a few things it can do other than that, but it doesn't have a web
browser and supports none of the social media or algorithmic news feed that
tends to take up our lives. You can still watch YouTube. Please don't stop
watching YouTube. You just won't be doing it on this phone. It's designed to
give you the most thoughtful and intentional version of yourself. And I
really want to like it. Oh, lordy. For a
second there, I thought that was the phone. And I was like, "Oh, but I it's
going to be pretty hard if it's this chunky." No, there it is. And it's still
pretty chunky. Wow. She is a bit of a
thick boy. Ah, yes. A braided USBC to
USBC
cable. That is all. Sorry. Sorry. Point of
clarification. There is a SIM removal tool in this piece of paper. This is
actually my very first hands-on with a light phone. And other than the design
philosophy, it has very little in common with the Lite 2, which apparently they
will continue to sell. The interface is more complicated. You get the same home
button, volume up, volume down, but now there's also a two-stage camera button
for the 50 megapixel rear sensor that apparently bends down to a 12 megapixel
final output. And they've got this little wheel on the left that apparently
is used for screen brightness and to activate the flashlight. At the top is a
power button as well as fingerprint sensor, but it should be noted that the
fingerprint reader, like quite a few other things, isn't working just yet.
There's also a mic up here for noise cancellation. Then at the bottom, we've
got a USBC for input, as well as the main mic. The internals are pretty
standard for what you'd expect from an entry-level smartphone. It uses a
Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 with six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage, which should
contribute to a much more responsive experience in Light OS, but also
contributes controversially to a much higher price than the older Light Phone
2. Another controversial decision was the switch from an e- in display to an
OLED display. monochromatic OLED, which
apparently will give it anywhere from two to three days of battery life, but
an OLED nonetheless. It is matte though, which
gives it a more e- inky look, but it's still not e ink. Time to learn light OS
after a quick message from our sponsor, the talking points for whom I will not
be receiving on my Light Phone 3 because usually they send them to me via Teams
and there's no Teams, just SMS. So, one
moment, please. And this is a fundamental flaw
in this product for me is that no, I actually need to access data and a
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functional smartphone rather than your locked down be present smartphone which
isn't to say that this is a wrong choice. It's just a different choice.
And let's see what this choice might look like. I assume this is my app.
Really? Oh, okay. No, no, this is okay.
Okay, so this is phone. There's no contacts. No contacts.
Please, come on. M coming haptics, but pretty
responsive. Whoa. You enter the phone
number first, then the name.
Okay. Call. Oh, right. One second. Throw
my SIM in here. Man, this really is the kind of product
that I desperately want to be excited about, but then I think about it for
more than two seconds and I'm like, how am I supposed to use this? Like, I was
thinking as we were starting this shoot, man, I should just throw my SIM in it
during the shoot and just keep it, right? Like, just try it. I was like, oh
yeah, no, immediately I need to do something that I I definitely absolutely
need my other phone for. Apparently, the speaker is supposed to be really good
cuz it has like a proper grill on it. Hello, wife. Do you want to just um say
something? I am about to get in the car to go to lunch with accounting. We're
going to McDonald's because apparently they have a Minecraft toy that somebody
wants. Okay. Well, that's good. How's
the mic quality for you? It's actually really good. I was It doesn't sound like
you're on uh I'm on speaker. Oh, okay. Well, here I'll take you off speaker and
maybe it'll be even better. Um a little
bit, but only because you told me to pay attention. I don't know if I would have
noticed otherwise. Okay, thanks wife. I think that'll be all. So, I'm struck
immediately by the fact that there is absolutely nothing to distract me in
this interface. There's no notification shade. There's no multitasking to, you
know, an app or a browser while I'm talking to somebody. That's it. When
you're talking to someone, you're talking to them. This is an interesting
one. When you scroll, instead of scrolling smoothly, it just takes you to
your next page. I assume this is just to
maintain continuity for the users who are on e- in displays because with the
hardware that's in here, there's no reason that they would have to do that. Okay, this is display brightness, right?
Oh, yeah. Okay. It definitely gets more
e- in like when you turn the display brightness down. But man, I got to say
one of the biggest benefits for me of using an e- in phone would be that I
would like read, right? I'm not going to be reading any ebooks on this, right? Do
they have an ebook app? Ah, yeah, that's tough. Okay. Well,
here, let's look at some of the other apps. I can set an
alarm 12:36, you know, whatever. And
then I can set it. Boom. It's set. One button to get rid of it. Do love that.
The number of buttons you have to press to get rid of an alarm on the iPhone.
It's like, why? Oo, pictures. Okay, hold on.
We'll try we'll try taking our own. There's also a selfie camera, by the way. 8 megapixels on that one, I think
it is. Oh, wow. This has like a very
Polaroid kind of feel to it. Is that Is that intentional or is
that just cuz it's like a crappy camera? Oh my god. Hold still. It says to take a
picture. Whoa,
buddy. That is the worst this picture I
have ever seen. You know, I always take this picture in this challenging
environment with the lights shining at me from the studio and everything. I
want to see like what kind of detail can be picked up. Like, see, that's a funny
thing is the resolution actually is not bad, but there's so much noise and the
color is atrocious.
So, they do say it's supposed to be like a film camera. Like a film camera. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, a film camera would have done a better job than this. share media
and I can send via MMS I guess right
like it doesn't do email right yeah no email so getting the full quality
version of the photo off is like no you plug in dude like a you know like a
camera like a digital camera maybe that's just because of the light
directly into the lens I'm going to take a picture this way
okay
right does it auto rotate
Uh, now it's a pretty square display,
okay? It's 1080 by like 12 something, so
you don't really need to rotate it, but I would like to. They They did
succeed in giving it kind of a filmic look. Let's try the selfie camera. Oh,
can you launch the camera just by pressing the camera button? Yes, you can. Thoughtful. Oh, you can record
video. I can already tell you that this is going to look like absolute butt
chunks. Can already tell you that this is going to look like absolute butt
chunks. The audio is great though. Ivonne was right. You know what? The
preview is worse than the actual recorded video. That's That's not that
bad. Okay. I do not like this. It's
completely taking over my screen when I'm changing the volume. I don't need to
be present adjusting my volume slider.
The selfie camera doesn't do the funny hold thing and actually looks a lot more
like a modern smartphone camera. Interesting. Wonder if that was a choice
or they just didn't code the like multi-exposure and then edit tom foolery
into the selfie cam calculator. Wow.
Hey, it's like Apple never made a new calculator. Okay, here. Let's add a
calendar event. Oo, that was that was a that was
a delay. I can't say where it is. Oh, yeah. There it is. There it is. Okay.
Okay. But I can't navigate there. I can't take an Uber there. That's tough.
How do you find that balance, right? Cuz like there's certain things that I would
need this to be able to do cuz otherwise I'm just going to have to carry a second
phone in my pocket. And by the time I do that, this has accomplished nothing. But
if it can do those smart doing things,
then all of a sudden it becomes not the distraction-free phone. And it's not
just not being able to take an Uber. I use alternate messaging platforms for
almost everyone that I talk to, whether
it's iMessage, cuz I happen to currently be on an iPhone right now, or Discord,
or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Like, I literally wouldn't be able to
coordinate with my badminton group and get signed up because it fills up in
like 4 minutes, right? cuz I won't be on
Facebook Messenger. We talk about how smartphones have kind of destroyed the
in-person social lives of the younger generation. But what I'll tell you is
that if I didn't have my smartphone, that would destroy my social life way
more because how would I like meet up
with anybody? I would tell them to call me and they'd be like, "Oh my god,
call you're like 40, not 60." Oh yeah,
no two factor. Oh, only SMS-based
two-factor. So 100% I would have to
Dude, I didn't even think all this stuff. You like brainstorm stuff to
throw at me during this. Oh my god. Yeah, I could I couldn't I couldn't get
a two-factor verification code. Okay, music though. Music. Let's talk about
music. You can upload songs on the light
dashboard. Ah, the light dashboard. So it's a web app you access on your
computer in order to interface with the phone. You can upload music, add apps,
and edit your contacts, which will be a good way to do that because it'll be a
little slow on here. Okay, so we got Crab Rafe. Let's go. I'm going to try to
pair my Bluetooth headphones. It has
Bluetooth, right? Yes. Yes, it has
Bluetooth. All right. See if it
works. That was an appropriate number of clicks to get back to the thing I was
just doing. Can I Can I Oh, there we go.
Oh, wait. No, it's coming through the phone. Sorry, my noise cancellation is
on. So, I Okay, but what the heck? What? No, this is just the
Bluetooth menu. I want to switch the audio
output. Okay, well, that's not good. I mean, the AirPods are just lowkey the
most popular wireless headphones on planet Earth. So,
uh, the fact that it does not immediately work with those is not great. I'm sure they're going to work on
that as well as implementing something with the NFC chip. Like, it has an NFC
chip, but right now it doesn't really do anything. I think the bigger issue for
me is even if my headphones did work, no
Spotify, no YouTube Music, no music apps. So, you literally just need to put
all your music on here and then like what the scroll wheel I can't even use
to scroll through my music list. So, like, is there a way to organize it
other than just like search, man? So, the interface is like somehow actually
worse than an OG iPod. Hey, does it do like speech to
text? Period. It really does. Oh, wow. It even managed to get the inquisitive
tone of my voice and put a question
mark. Oh, but then it also put a random
comma there and put a random period there. So, your mileage may vary. It can
do podcasts, so that's something. And
you can always tell the priorities of the creators of products like this. It's
like no distractions, but definitely podcasts. But music is going to be a
sucky experience. But podcasts, we got you. Like look at this. Look at this
podcast app compared to the music one, dude. We got like subscribe podcast. We
got our Bluetooth. Okay, that wasn't the music one. Sync trigger. We can sync
them in the background. We can
synchronize. We got settings. We can autoplay the next episode. Dude, the
creators, they like their podcasts. Oh, don't do that. There are a
few more things to talk through. It's IP54 water resistant. It's more
repairable than their previous one. The screen's apparently easier to repair.
The battery is easily replaceable. So, that's pretty cool. But the elephant in
the room is, of course, the cost. at $600 to $800 depending on if you buy it
at launch or if you buy it at retail later. This is right up there with some
flagship class Android smartphones, many
of which could be pretty easily configured to, you know, prompt you for
distractions or disable apps or whatever else. Whether you have the discipline to
do those things or not, well, that's kind of down to you. And that's where
the Light Phone is supposed to shine. But for me, I just don't see how I could
make this work. It's funny. I actually got a WhatsApp message from someone
saying that they will not be contactable on WhatsApp anymore because they just
switched to a light phone. Moved to a dumb phone. No more WhatsApp text or
call going forward. I said, "What the Text so unsecure." Uh they said,
"Fair point. Had to do it." I said, "I give you 3 and 1/2 weeks." That was on
March the 26th. I'm going to call him right now and find out if he's off it
yet. I'm going to call him on WhatsApp. See if he gets the call. You know what?
No, I'm doing this entirely wrong. I'm doing this totally wrong. Hold on.
Calling from my light phone. Yo, I'm on ShortCircuit. I'm uh
unboxing the Light Phone 3 and I was just kind of wondering, is that the one
that you went with for your dumb phone? You're on it right now. So, this could
be the very first Light Phone to Light Phone 3 call because as far as I can
tell from spending some time with this thing, nobody is going to use
this thing, dude. He says, "You got to be out of your mind." Yeah. Yeah. See
that? That's what I'm talking about. So, are you off it yet? You're not off it
then? Oh, the reception apparently sucks. Well, I'm getting so much insight
cuz he's been using this thing for a week, man. This is This is great. I should make you use the products before
I unbox them every time. Dude, I gave you 3 weeks, I think. Right. Do you
think you're going to make it? You're going to stick with it? All right.
Thanks. Okay, I'll let you go. Wow. He describes the experience of
using it as quote a show and then says,
"But I'm sticking with it. I hate phones. I was getting like 800 messages
a day." So, there you go. For the right
user, there it is. Light phone 3. I just
don't think I have the discipline for it. But I do have the discipline to tell
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