Five years after the Light Phone 2 launched, co-founder Kaiwei Tang says it’s selling better than ever. This is both extremely unusual for a phone and kind of the point of the thing: Tang, co-founder Joe Hollier, and their team built a phone that was designed to do very little and last practically forever. Their E Ink device became a hit among people looking for a way to get away from their smartphones for a bit, to “go light,” in the company’s parlance. The Light Phone 2 made calls, sent texts, and not much else. That worked really well for a lot of people, for a long time.
Now, Light is trying to do something a bit different. The company is launching the Light Phone 3, which comes with a new display, a camera, and a few other features that Tang says the company has found most users just can’t live without. The goal is once again to build a simpler, less alluring smartphone for when you want to check out but also, this time, to maybe replace your smartphone for good.
The Light Phone 3’s biggest change is a new display. The E Ink screen is gone, replaced by a 3.92-inch black-and-white OLED panel. “E Ink, the refresh rate — almost 50 percent of our users couldn’t get used to it,” Tang says. “That’s the main reason they give up.” This isn’t the most impressive screen you’ll ever see, at 1080 x 1240 pixels, but it refreshes faster and should feel familiar to more users. You also control the brightness with a new scroll wheel on the left side because Tang says he hates when a phone automatically just blares light at your face. (The wheel also clicks to turn on the flashlight.)
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