Dear readers, I have a confession: I am suffering from an ailment that the younger ones call “brain rot,” the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on my phone. These days, it’s tough to even finish a book.
Plenty of people have this problem. So many, it has birthed a category of minimalist tech products striving to rid us of distractions, from the Ai Pin, the now defunct artificially intelligent lapel pin that took notes, to phones with only basic features.
The latest example, the $600 Light Phone III, from a Brooklyn start-up, is a stripped-down phone that does barely anything. The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else.
There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there’s no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn’t even email.
“You use it when you need to, and when you put it back it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the chief executive of Light, the start-up that has developed multiple iterations of the Light Phone over the last nine years. “We get a lot of customers telling us they feel less stressed out, they become more productive, they become creative.”
I was curious to see if the Light Phone could cure me of brain rot, so I used it as my primary phone for a week. There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.
It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks.
But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and over all I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door.
Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.
Here’s how my week went running errands, commuting and going out with a lower-tech phone.
Getting Started
When I set up my review unit of the Light Phone over the weekend, the phone, which looks like a black rectangular slab, was pretty bare-bones. The phone’s menu was a black screen showing a white-text list of its features: phone, camera, photo album and alarm. To add more tools, I had to use a web browser on my computer to access a dashboard, where I could install features like a maps app, notepad and timer.
Now that I was ready to go, I was determined to live, at least for a while, without my iPhone.
Commuting to Work
On Monday morning, I started my commute to work, taking a train from Oakland, Calif., to San Francisco. When I arrived at the station, I realized I couldn’t enter without my iPhone because years ago I had converted my physical transit pass, the Clipper Card, into a virtual one stored in my smartphone’s mobile wallet.
The Light Phone lacked a mobile wallet to load the virtual transit card, so I sheepishly went back home to get my iPhone and ultimately showed up to the office a half-hour late.
Going to the Gym
I ran into a similar snag one evening at my rock climbing gym. To get in, members use their phones to log in to the gym’s website and generate a temporary bar code that gets scanned at the entrance. Because the Light Phone lacked a web browser, I couldn’t create a bar code, so I had to wait in line at the front desk.
Texting Friends and Taking Photos
I added a few of my closest friends to the address book on the Light Phone and sent them text messages explaining my experiment. Typing on the device’s keyboard felt sluggish in part because there was no autocorrect feature to fix typos. As a result, conversations were terse.
Hilarity ensued when I sent people photos. Poorly lit and grainy, the images looked as if they were produced with a phone camera from at least 15 years ago.
“Retro!” one friend said in response to a blurry photo of my daughter.
“Wow, that’s bad,” another friend said about a dimly lit photo of my corgi, Max.
Light’s founders said they were proud of the Light Phone camera, which has a nostalgic feel to it.
Running Errands
One afternoon, I had to drop off an Amazon return at a UPS Store. I chose the most convenient shipping option, which involved showing a QR code for scanning.
The problem? The Light Phone had no email app or web browser to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on my computer screen and snapped a mediocre picture with the phone.
When I brought the package to UPS and presented the photo, I held my breath, hoping that the image was clear enough. The UPS employee held the scanner up and, after three attempts, I heard a beep and a shipping label printed.
What a relief, but also, what a hassle.
Lunch Date
On another afternoon, my wife and I went out for an impromptu lunch date. I backed the car out and then had to ask my wife to use her iPhone to close our garage door with the app MyQ. (Our physical garage door opener stopped working years ago.)
Then, we were trying to remember the name of a new sushi restaurant we had recently read about on a food blog. I couldn’t help dig up the blog post on the Light Phone. Eventually, we made a guess and ended up at the wrong restaurant. It was nice, though, to have lunch together without the temptation to check my email.
Bottom Line
While I admire the goal of the Light Phone, my experience demonstrates there’s nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including getting around town, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.
This Light Phone experiment reminded me of glamping: paying a lot to have an artificially crummier experience.
I can’t think of many people whose jobs would let them realistically use a Light Phone as their only phone. Too many of us rely on tools like Slack and email to communicate.
The Light Phone might be better suited as a secondary leisure phone, similar to a weekend car, for people to unplug when they are off work. But even then, the camera quality may be a deal breaker for some.
Mr. Tang, Light’s chief executive, acknowledged that the Light Phone was not for everyone, but added that parents have considered buying the phone for their children to be less distracted in school. The company is also working on adding more tools, such as mobile payments and the ability to request a Lyft car.
