The Light Phone 3 adds a better screen, a camera, and new ways to replace your smartphone

Five years after the launch of the Light Phone 2, co-founder Kaiwei Tang says it is selling better than ever. That’s extremely unusual for a phone, and it’s the whole 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. Its E Ink device became a success among people who were looking for a way to get away from smartphones for a bit, to “go light”, in the company’s jargon. The Light Phone 2 made calls, sent texts and nothing else. This worked really well for a lot of people, for a long time.

Now, Light is trying to do something a little 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 simply can’t live without. The goal is to once again build a simpler, less attractive smartphone for when you want to check it out, but also, this time, maybe replace your smartphone for good.

The biggest change to the Light Phone 3 is a new screen. The E Ink screen is gone, replaced by a 3.92-inch black and white OLED panel. “And Ink, the refresh rate – almost 50% of our users couldn’t get used to it,” says Tang. “That’s the main reason they quit.” This isn’t the most impressive display you’ve ever seen, at 1080 x 1240 pixels, but it refreshes faster and should look familiar to more users. You also control the brightness with a new scroll wheel on the left side, because Tang says he hates it when a phone automatically brightens your face. (The wheel also clicks to turn on the flashlight.)

The Light Phone 2’s lack of a camera was the other reason, which is why the new model has a rear camera. However, it’s not a normal smartphone setup: it’s just a 50-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel camera on the front, each with a fixed focal length and a central focus. It’s as much for scanning QR codes and video chatting as anything else, says Tang, and because it has a dedicated shutter button, shooting with it should feel more like an old film camera than an iPhone. “There is no editing or sharing, just document the moment if necessary.”

Additionally, the device has a bunch of what you might call future-proof updates. There is an NFC chip because Light wants to integrate payments at some point. There’s a USB-C port because that’s what everyone uses now. You can replace the battery yourself, which should help the device last longer. There is a fingerprint reader, Qualcomm SM 4450 processor, 128 GB of storage and 6 GB of RAM. Everything comes in a slightly larger case than before — Tang calls it “BlackBerry-sized,” compared to the credit card-sized Light Phone 2 — and even the aluminum side buttons are built to last.

The new phone is available for pre-order now, and Tang says it will be released next January. For now, it costs $399, though Tang says he’s not sure what the final price will be. It depends on how many Light sells. The company’s promotional materials say the Light Phone 3’s retail price will be $799, which is dangerously close to full-fledged smartphone territory, but the company hopes to sell enough devices to make them a little cheaper to produce. which would mean it could reduce that final price.

For years, the problem with minimalist smartphones (or dumbphones, or feature phones, or whatever you want to call them) has been the nearly impossible balance they try to strike. How do you make a phone that does everything people need and nothing more? Everyone has their mission-critical applications and they are always different.

Tang and the Light team spent years trying to figure out how to manage this. They created simple tools for music, podcasts, calendar, navigation and notes. They’re thinking about how to integrate Spotify’s API, create a way to make Uber or Lyft work on the Light Phone, make payments, send voice notes, and more. It is also interested in integrating with Beeper to add more messaging services. Light isn’t firmly against apps, Tang reminds me, beyond the endless feeds. It’s just against the chaos of modern smartphones and trying to find better ways to get the features people want without the chaos that so often accompanies them. It’s a difficult balance to find.

Light has also been playing with ChatGPT and other AI tools to see if they could be a way to bring more information to users without subjecting them to endless news feeds and engagement bait. “We have been experimenting” with AI, says Tang, “but we don’t have the confidence that we can set a clear boundary for our users.” Light users trust the company to set those limits, he says, and he doesn’t want to oversell the feature set and turn people off.

In some ways, the Light Phone 3 is the lightest device the company has ever made. It has more capabilities, more resources and more things to do and tinker with. But Tang hopes this is all in service of a larger goal, which is to get people away from their smartphones and the endless notifications and feeds they contain. “I’m not trying to design old phones,” he says. “I want to design all this modern technology, from scratch, and eliminate all this bullshit.” You can’t beat smartphones with worse phones. Maybe you can do this with others.