Light Phone 2: A simple 4G phone with e-ink
indiegogo.com
indiegogo.com
Also it's $3-400. Insane.
I can get a commodity android phone for $150, remove all of the apps, and with a little self control have the same thing.
It looks good, though.
Take any Android phone, uninstall all messaging apps, disable all other forms of background transfers and sync (increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS).
Enjoy your 3 to 4 day battery life.
You said active use, but this phone doesn't have any active uses, by design.
Standby time on modern smart phones isn't half bad, if you get rid of everything that wakes up the device!
Go to Settings / Battery and you can prevent or minimise a applications background cpu usage. Then go to your Data usage, from there you can prevent or minimize background data transfer.
This has greatly improved battery life on my phone.
Android used to let you disable 3G/4G data and just limit the phone to 2G data - - low bandwidth but adequate for syncing email and other tasks, much lower power usage. Unfortunately that option seems to have been removed.
Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.
> Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.
You can always have peace of mind with airplane mode or whole data disabled.
Oh well. :/
You can get rid of most, if not all, of that with Lineage OS.
>It brings a few essential tools to the Light Phone, like messaging, an alarm clock, or a ride home
And yet further down it says that these are not even definite features, but "some features that we might explore".
Clearly the appearance is the selling point. From a utility perspective flip/button phones make a lot more sense if you're only using them as phones.
$300 seems quite a stretch when there are a huge variety of dirt cheap dumb phones around. How about a Jenny TV 2.8 [1] with 175 hours standby for $30 at Amazon?
Or a Nokia 130 with up to a month of standby, which sells for around $25 in India. [2]
Kindle Paperwhite is 1420 mAh...
A sunlight-readable ruggedized e-ink phone would be useful. But that's not their target market.
Starting a hardware product by making a niche product and expanding the market and device complexity over iterations on the hardware is a proven success path. "Active" apps require third party buy in, which is hard for a new company to achieve.
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-8110-4g-banana-p...
About $100 too. Might just pick one up for fun to see how it goes.
KaiOS is apparently a fork of Boot 2 Gecko, so all JS. The dev portal is alright, but the main website is unusable and takes over the scroll in a huge way.
However, there are people requesting it: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Simplified-versi... and https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Partners-Web-Player-e....
So the answer to your question is "no", but it might.
FYI, I am not interested in this phone and it took me 30 seconds of searching the Internet to find this info. It took me longer to write this comment. It really doesn't seem like you've put in an effort of searching for such info.
Look at the Galaxy Pocket Neo released for the African markets for instance, priced at less than $130 at release, had 3 days battery life and would be considered a modern smart phone.
This on the other hand, has much less capability in a less robust form and costs double that.
2g/3g probably works around the world. notice how they mentioned band 1/2/3/whatever support, which isn't used to describe 2g/3g frequencies. i'm guessing the only reason your nokia could work anywhere around the world is because there are only a few bands for 2g/3g. whereas there are a few dozen for lte.
The best implementation I've heard of so far was YotaPhone 2 - https://yotaphone.com/gb-en/. A proper smartphone with two screens - normal one on the front, an e-ink on the back. I was considering to buy it some time ago, but I discovered the product was abandoned. If someone could re-do this concept, but put the specs of ~Galaxy S7 inside, I'd buy that in a heartbeat, even at flagship prices.
Or even better, I'd love if someone could make a proper e-ink tablet. Give me 12.3-inch e-ink touchscreen and a software stack that would let me read, browse, write e-mails and run a text editor on it, and it'll be my new go-to machine. If I could hook up a keyboard to it and run Emacs on it (even terminal Emacs via SSH), I'd be in heaven.
I'm hoping for a reMarkable 2.
it says 10.3" screen at 1872x1404
The best part of the Light Phone 2 is that pitch video. Showing how pervasive (invasive) smartphones have been become. Bullseye.
As appealing as the Light Phone 2 is... Google Maps was the killer feature that got me to board the smartphone crazy train. Especially when traveling. The thought of forfeiting maps gives me pangs of separation anxiety.
I bought the light phone (1), it's a complete piece of garbage. Controls & feels like some of the crappy stuff from around 2000. I tried to use it once, but it turned out to be unusable outside due to being white and reflecting more sunlight than it's leds/display could produce... (I did feel stupid at that point, yes).
Hope they do a better job at this one & then, maybe, if they drop the price by 50% I'd consider it.
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/nokia-8110-4g-banana-p...
Personally I've yet to see a phone that fits my hand better than the iphone5. The chamfered edges are about perfect for holding without a case. I think it was the last iphone designed for using without a case, too; my current iphone7, aside from just not quite fitting in the hand that way, kept getting taken off of silent mode because the silent switch would catch on something in my pocket. Clearly, it was made to be kept in a case.
I mean, hands are different.
but I'm pretty sure it's just a personal taste thing.
However ergonomic a Nokia was doesn't really matter to me when its functionality was vastly limited. I'll take a massive screen that supports many more applications over a text/call machine that has a better grip.
Can you provide a phone that combines the two? At least here in Mexico you can still buy cheap brick phones if that's your preference.
The old Nokias (since the 5110) were actually designed to always be used in a case (which would characteristically snap off when it hit the ground, reducing the impact). Don't you remember all the custom 3310 cases?
I've just broken my Galaxy S7 for this very reason. It looks nice, and it feels slick, but it's heavy and it's slippery as hell. 99% of the time you catch it, but when you pick your phone up 100 times a week... I'm back on my Nexus 5X in the meantime and the combination of matte finish and light weight makes it so much easier to use, not to mention it lasts much longer on a smaller battery.
Use a decent pair of BT or wired headset/buds/speaker, and you're no longer putting a (potentially hot-running) cell radio up to your head and regain use of both your hands.
Much safer for driving too.
Any phone bigger than an iPhone SE is completely unusable for me, as it requires two hands to control the whole screen. The screen of the SE allow me to reach everything with just my thumb, which is awesome.
No form of talking on the phone is safe, do not do it.
The Apple Watch Series 3 has almost all of the features of the Light Phone 2 (missing battery life), and is equally as non-distracting. The Light Phone 2 is missing several features of Apple Watch Series 3 like Health Kit and Apple Pay. Configuring call forwarding and message forwarding is much simpler with Apple Watch than it is for Light Phone. Preordering a Light Phone 2 costs $300 and and will ship next April. Buying an Apple Watch Series 3 costs $320 and you can pick you up today.
If you have an iPhone I would recommend an Apple Watch to someone wanting to leave the phone behind from time to time instead of this. This might be more useful to spending days away from a charging station, someone without an iPhone, or someone that doesn't like wearing watches.
I assume there is an Android Watch product with most of the big features of the Apple Watch too.
it's the phone that literally makes me forget it exists until I actually get called, that has to be the least distracting possible while still having a phone.
Yet this is still all about aesthetics for $300. Cheap basic credit card sized phones already exist [1], sure it doesn't last as long, but it's only £10 and doesn't require another smart phone to function properly.
These have setups for call forwarding and the Apple Watch has SMS forwarding. They are designed to be a second device.
That said I wouldn't spend $300 on a feature phone when I can get a basic one for $50 or less which can do everything that this one can.
The Light Phone appears to be for people looking for a specific aesthetic rather than actually coming close to being in a middle ground between being unplugged and carrying a smartphone.
Also, all feature phones are hideous.
I think there's a market for a feature phone that has nice messaging and looks good. And since it's based on Android, it might be possible to write apps for it (messaging apps would absolutely make sense).
If your feature phone has Bluetooth you can use a Bluetooth keyboard together with it. You can even use a laptop's keyboard (I know it is possible on Linux and Maemo), perhaps even a game controller [1], and perhaps even a remote (mine has a keyboard).
Finally, if you got dictation it doesn't matter. I do agree T9 is horrible though. But if you do use it regularly, you get used to it.
[1] https://www.gearbest.com/air-mouse/pp_756041.html?wid=143336...
I like Apple Pay, I think it is kind of big deal. It's really cool to be able to buy a cup of coffee or some groceries without needing a wallet. It's not the ideal implementation of digital payments, but it's an effective one used by a respectable number of businesses.
I disable notifications i don't care / are not notificatin worthy. I remove myself from newsletters. I use the 'Do not disturb' mode.
I don't need an 'light' phone. I need my phone as powerful as it is right now when i wanna use google maps, it should be fast and responsive and with great details.
So I can already see how this device might be useful. If you are shooting out the house quickly to go surfing, climbing, trail running you can grab your light phone with a smaller physical footprint and only essential functionality.
But at $300 not sure its worth it yet. The new Nokia 3310 offers most of the same for $55.
These features were all common on old dumbphones like the previously-mentioned Nokia and some Motorolas [or Jitterbugs]. Whenever a 'hip' dumbphone is released, such as this one or the regrettably-named 'Punkt,' they look cool but fail miserably in two or more of those criteria.
While I agree that it's just android under the hood - a price of $300+ and not letting developers get in on the action is just too much for me.
- People call you on your phone number, so you have to swap your sim card from smart-phone to this every time you want to "go light". Also phone-book sync, etc.
- e-ink displays are incredibly fragile.
If I were spending $US300 on a phone, it ought to be my daily driver.
So I would assume this is for people who, if they do want to access social media on iOS/Android then they do it from the comfort of a large screen device such as a wifi-only iPad, tethering to their 4G dumbphone.
Oh and there's nothing preventing an e-ink device from using a cloud addressbook.
I think the display on my kindle is about as solid as a cellphone display...I carry mine around in a cargo pocket and it regularly gets slammed into furniture.
I mean, i do break them, but I break cellphones, too, and I treat my kindles rather harder than I treat my cellphone.
hmm, i have the opposite impression. compared to lcd, eink displays seem pretty robust.
The handover (between cells) had some issues when driving, so sometimes calls dropped when you crossed cell boundaries. In retrsospect it seemed like a race condition in the logic that notes where to route an ongoing conversation to in the event of a cell switch, combined with both phones fighting over which cell this number is in.
The nice thing about the old phone/radio was the classic green backlit monochrome dotmatrix text display.
I lived with a dumb phone for a long time.
I know have a one plus 6 with very good camera capabilities, but I use it only to take a picture of things I'm too lazy to note.
There is a niche for this.
I agree that the phone is expensive, but I like the design. It's funny that people are comparing it to $100 Android phones. Those already exist, you can get them in vending machines at the airport. This isn't that. It's hard to get anything simple with LTE without building it yourself. I'd pay money for what is not in this phone. I'm already $2k into my DIY dumbphone project and it's not reliably hanging out in my pocket making calls.
I started with this arm platform called Firefly
I really like how their coreboard are set up. The current version is about the size of an apple TV. I wanted to get away from actually needing a touch screen so I've been working with a dev unit of a low power laser projector that also does depth scanning to allow for optional alerts and gestural interfaces. The unit I'm using is from this company Microvision. They have a couple retail products, I don't know if they even have the production capacity to do their depth sensing units at scale, but they'll sell you dev units if you email them.
http://www.microvision.com/technology/
People always want to use these things for watching movies or whatever, which they will make a 100" screen on the wall, but they are extremely low lumens, so I focus on short throw and an interface that only uses four colors. CYMK. Since it's a laser, it doesn't need to focus and blacks are absolute so it works pretty well.
I just got an Intel Realsense the other day and I'm hoping to move to that for depth sensing and just use MV's projection module. And their tools are great even if brand new mostly and need some help. It's a cool platform.
They bill the Firefly as good for AR installations and stuff and it has the ability to do synced stereo vision that is helpful for depth stuff, but I've found that to largely be a giant pain in my ass to pretend like I'm going to solve. That and mounting two CCDs really breaks my already pretty kludgy assembly.
Using this unit as the pcie LTE modem.
http://shop.t-firefly.com/goods.php?id=49
Funny thing about most LTE modems, there' sa good hackaday article on this problem, but even though they are capable of PCM audio on chip, they don't give you access, so if you wanna do voice, you're stuck with crazy hacks or VoIP. There is a neat 4 modem board availible that also supports virtual sims (which I didn't even know was a thing and sounds exploitable) but or some reason has an audio bus that works with a couple models of modems. I might be getting some of the details wrong on this problem, I'll see if I can find the hackaday article, but a quick google search didn't turn it up. Voice communication isn't my favorite thing anyway, so VoIP or XMPP/WebRTC is fine with me.
For less hand waving interface I started with two of these power point mice that I got super cheap. They are bluetooth, have a reasonable accelerometer, a few buttons, and most importantly a thumb stick with a press mode so with two I've been working on a trainer to use the thumb sticks as a twiddler keyboard since there's enough combinations to do full querty and plus some.
Now that I've tested that out, I'm designing a controller myself, still faster and more interactive to use two, but I'm working on a pattern for easy one handed text entry.
I bought a set of Bone Conduction headphones that I liked except for their fidelity and how ugly they were so, I'm playing around with building something myself. Exciters are cheap and I think I can do better. What I like about bone conduction is that your ears are open and what you're hearing doesn't interrupt regular life. Ear buds are great for closing our the world, but that goes against what I want out of my "phone".
Basically I'm annoyed and overloaded by all the crap that all the tech around me blasts at us all the time. I think it's inelegant, annoying, and motivated by bullshit sales and ad tracking exploitation. Because of that no one has improved on shit in 10 fucking years. From my tech I want it to give me less, work with me to provide communication, stay the hell out of my face, but also I want to own my platform and know what it's doing. Most importantly, I'd like it to actually be freaking cool. We are essentially using the exact same device as the first iphone. That isn't because we can't do better, it's because it works to keep us in line, vendor locked, and ready to shell out for the next one.
So yeah, the "phone" is kind of big, especially with the battery, which is roughly the size of a Stephen King paperback, but it lasts forever and has an AC invert er which is handy sometimes. This prototype stuff isn't quite ready to be rugged and travel with me, but the goal is to get it down to something easy to even put in my back pocket, but at least in my backpack, but really all I'm interacting with is the twiddler and the headphones. If I'm working I can set the thing on my desk and I it can use color, motion, and clear, uncluttered text to share info with me.
Because I'm doing weird point cloud depth scanning, starting with an ARM platform has been a giant pain in my ass. There have been some powerful and small x86 platforms that have come out recently like the LattePanda, so I'm eyeballing that as the next move to speed up the software side of stuff. Also I've been playing with the LimeSDR, it's technically capable of LTE and tons of other stuff. Their package manager isn't up to snuff yet, but the next gen will be capable of ranges up to 5G. The dream with this pile of techno garbage is some sort of open source, not awful, mesh network phone that still can use your t-mobile account until your friends get enough SDR radios that we can just say fuck it to the telcos.
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1727.html
https://myriadrf.org/projects/limesdr/
But to answer the question you probably have, my daily driver is an iPhone7 that I would be fine if it fell in the ocean. My brand new macbook pro had keys falling off and it's USB-C went out after 3 months, so I've left most of apple's ecosystem for good. All the parts for way cooler stuff is out there! We can totally just quit paying thousands of dollars for bullshit ad-slabs and take our communication back.
Sorry, I guess that was quite the barf. I've been working on this off and on going on 3 years now but haven't looked at it in months because of a new job. I forgot how much was going on with it. hah.
Are there any owners of previous model who could share their experience?
I think making the software side extensible could make this a great phone for hackers.
It needs to have that "ride home" feature, and probably "rides anywhere." If that works I might spend $300 on it just for the 12ish nights a year I would use it--it's a small cost compared to babysitter, restaurant, show, Lyfts, etc.
Everyone is whining about cost but ignoring the fact that someone is trying to innovate in this space. Who cares what it costs. They're pushing something out, and eventually if Apple and other major manufacturers offer low power displays, people will appreciate the option.
All previews of the phone exclude e-ink. They are all fitted with bad quality LCD screens (which you can't read outside).
(I'm not saying I like it -- I often disable JS myself. It works great for most news sites.)
I don't know if it's required or not, but I think previous poster was suggesting that the bezel was needed in e-ink displays, and all the kindles I know of have a bezel, even though that bezel is flush on the voyage and oasis models. Now, I personally think that poster is wrong, at least if we are using bezel in the sense that the iphone x is bezel-less; but the current crop of e-ink kindles are not bezel-less.
Personally, I think typing is okay on the paperwhite and the second gen oasis... on the voyage and on the first gen oasis, the thing wasn't responsive enough to type comfortably, in my opinion. I dunno if that had anything to do with it being e-ink, though; It could have easily been an anemic processor.
I‘m sure you can achieve the same stuff on any android phone.
Buying yet another gadget, that you will likely play around a lot with in the beginning, seems kind of like the opposite of going light.
As a gadget this looks really neat though and I kind of want to develop apps for it.
It's more than a gadget personally, I use these essential features all the time:
* camera
* payement (apple pay, starbucks, other cards)
* banking (Monzo and Revolut only exist as apps)
* plane tickets
* access to important docs on dropbox anywhere
* music (apple music)
* reading (news feed, articles, papers, etc.)
I live in a country where they have shut off the 2G network. 3G may well suffer the same fate within a few years, as carriers migrate to 5G.