If you were looking for a sign to try out a “dumb phone,” here it is: the trendy, minimalist Light Phone is joining forces with Noble Mobile, a phone network founded by entrepreneur and politician Andrew Yang that gives you money back if you use less data.
On Tuesday, 500 Light Phone III models will be in stock and ready to ship through Noble Mobile. The catch is that you have to sign up for a two-year Noble Mobile phone plan at $50 per month, which comes out to $1,200 for the contract.
As those who have been curious about the Light Phone may know, this is the first time ever that the Light Phone III will be available immediately, and without paying its $699 cost up front. If you were to buy the Light Phone III without the Noble Mobile plan, the company estimates that you wouldn’t get your phone until September.
“I think what’s exciting about the Noble launch is not just that the barrier to entry is lower. It’s the first time that we’ve ever had the Light Phone III available for an immediate purchase,” Light co-founder Joe Hollier told TechCrunch.
Hollier and his co-founder Kaiwei Tang met in 2014 at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator, which was specifically geared toward artists and designers. They created the Light Phone, a device that has generated buzz and curiosity over the last decade.
The Light Phone offers a middle ground between a hyperconnected iPhone and a clunky flip phone with a T-9 keypad, appealing to an ever-growing audience of people who feel like they’re in a parasitic relationship with their smartphone. But as a small startup competing with mass producers like Samsung and Apple, Light Phone has struggled to ship its devices at an affordable rate without wait times; the ongoing RAM shortage isn’t exactly helping either. Since the Light Phone III launched last spring, the company has shipped 20,000 devices.
The hope is that for some customers, the “catch” of signing up for a Noble Mobile contract comes as a benefit. For a mobile plan with unlimited talk, text, and data, $50 per month is reasonable. But the gimmick behind Noble Mobile is that if you use less than 20 GB of data in a month, you get a dollar back for each GB that you don’t use (so, if you use 11 GB of data in a month, you would get $9 back from your $50 payment — and yes, you could also just stay on Wi-Fi to keep data usage low). You can get that payment in cash, or you can use it like credit card points, which can be cashed out later for rewards.
“The Light Phone is designed to be used as little as possible, so it’s on brand with Noble,” Hollier said.
How does the Light Phone work?
The Light Phone III has a lot of the basics that you’d expect from a smartphone. Users can make phone calls, send texts, and do other basic things, but the Light creators have also considered that modern life has made it hard to be a luddite. The device has a directions app and a directory app, which came in handy for one Reddit user who wrote about the experience of using the phone’s limited functionality to successfully find a towing company when their car broke down (“thanks to the lightphone I was able to *intentionally* ponder on all my life decisions up to this point while waiting 45 minutes,” they wrote).
The Light Phone’s greatest challenge has been to figure out exactly what level of minimalism customers want. Is supporting rideshare apps a safety feature, or a capitulation to big tech? What if a customer wants to communicate with international relatives via WhatsApp?
Hollier said that while most Light Phone customers use it as their primary phone, some users keep an old smartphone without a SIM card, which they can use via the Light Phone hotspot in case they need it. It’s an understandable compromise, but some users might be turned off by the idea of carrying two phones in the name of minimalism.
“It’s really interesting to see how people fit [Light Phone] into their lives… Some people are actively switching between two phones, and we’ve seen a new trend of users actually getting two phone numbers, kind of like a work phone, home phone balance,” Hollier said. “It’s been really cool to see all the different ways that people fit the Light Phone in, because it’s not really a one-size-fits-all situation.”
Unlike past iterations of the Light Phone, the newest model has an OLED screen, rather than an e-ink screen. With that color OLED screen, the designers figured they might as well add in front- and back-facing cameras, which will also prove useful when the phone soon starts supporting video calls.
Still, Light’s founders hesitated before adding a camera to the Light Phone. Hollier and Tang are both film photographers, and while they appreciate that smartphones expand access to photography, they have also observed that the maximalist nature of smartphone photography can devalue the actual joy and intentionality of the art form.
“We talked to people who are like, I took 27,000 iPhone photos last year, and I’ve looked at them zero times, because it’s like, 10 of one meal,” Tang told TechCrunch. “I can tell you how many film photos I took last year.”
Ultimately, they decided that a camera is a necessary tool, but they still did it their way.
“We just tried to design our camera by taking out what we felt like was the culprit of people actually falling out of the moment, which is sharing, and then waiting for this dopamine hit of reactions,” Hollier said. “On our camera, we added a physical shutter button, and you can open it with one touch, and you can half-press to start to focus … We wanted it to be fun, sort of nostalgic. It’s not doing any sort of AI sharpening or covering your blemishes. It’s just exactly like an old point-and-shoot camera.”
The Light Phone still has some critical drawbacks — it doesn’t support the industry standard RCS texting, relying instead on basic, insecure SMS. In practice, that means your group chat experience will be clunky, your messages will not be end-to-end encrypted, and any photos and videos you send will get compressed. But maybe the target user is someone who doesn’t care if their texts might look weird to their iPhone-wielding friends. That user would likely also be someone who is excited about the mission behind Noble Mobile.
“It’s not about asking people to [either] give up their technology, or use this AI 6G smartphone,” Tang said. “There’s a middle ground of having the right technology tools that design without the attention and advertising layer of it.”
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