Light Phone III Review: The Anti-Smartphone

“You don't drive a bus everywhere you go,” Kaiwei Tang tells me in a large startup lab in Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York City. He's a cofounder of Light Phone. The bus in this analogy is a smartphone, and all the seats are apps. As the driver, you're trying to focus on the road, but all of the notifications from your passenger apps on this very packed bus are vying for your attention, distracting you from what's right in front of your eyes. Tang believes you can get by with, say, a bicycle—one seat, no distractions, getting you from point A to point B. In this case, the bicycle is the Light Phone III. This is the latest from the Brooklyn-based company that made a splash with the Light Phone II in 2019. Its devices focus purely on utility, basic phone functions with no access to app stores—with a few extra capabilities over dumb phones—so you won't be hounded with Slack notifications when you're on vacation. Outside of a workplace reprieve, it tries to wean you off the dopamine rush of ... Read full article.