Light Phone 2 one year retrospect

The first time I used the Light Phone 2’s GPS, I drove to Los Angeles for a date. I ended up parked in a red zone, hyperventilating to the rhythm of my hazard lights. All I did was get lost, and yet, I was seconds away from puking all over myself. (I didn’t, thank goodness.) I should have picked a lower-stakes event to test-drive the navigation feature, but I assumed it would work as well as Google Maps. I was wrong.

The Light Phone’s GPS was awful a year ago. It often thought I was on a surface street instead of the adjacent freeway, or vice versa, so it would incorrectly tell me to keep going or take an exit that didn’t exist and not register my actual location until a few minutes later — if it registered that at all. It also took several minutes to find my location when I started it up, and it wasn’t great at finding an address if I typed in the name of a business. I was furious that I had spent $339 for the phone, case, and screen protector so I didn’t have to rely on my smartphone, and all it had done for me so far was trigger my anxiety and nearly ruin a date.

But I decided to make it work, and the Light Phone 2 is still my primary phone a year later. To be fair to the Light Phone, the situation wasn’t entirely its fault. Yes, the GPS was awful, and it did get me lost, but driving around Los Angeles makes me nervous on the best of days, and I should have tested the navigation around town like a good little tech reviewer before driving 30 miles across county lines to go on a date. 

This 2020s-era mashup of a phone — with its chunky plastic body, E Ink touchscreen, and deliberate absence of apps — isn’t for everyone. Reviewers and tech enthusiasts alike have come away from using the Light Phone 2 with little more than a shrug. Others genuinely enjoyed it but couldn’t find a way to integrate it into their lives. Even The Verge wrote, “We might say we want to kick our tech addictions, but who among us is ready to shell out $350 for a gadget that does so little?” back in 2019. But the “dumb phone” boom is real, and people are looking for ways to peel their eyes from their smartphones like a layer of Elmer’s glue from their hand — to remove a part of themselves that really isn’t a part of themselves.

The Light Phone works for me because I was ready to commit to living a smartphone-free life as much as possible. Muting notifications and deleting the apps off my smartphone had done nothing to curb the compulsion to check my accounts. If I felt anxious or bored, reaching for my smartphone was an automatic reaction, to the point where I sometimes didn’t realize my phone was in my hand until I was 10 cat videos deep on Instagram. I’m the kind of person who likes to retain control over my faculties, so that terrified me. By making the Light Phone my primary phone, I hoped to separate myself from easy access to social media and change my relationship with how and when I accessed the internet. The Light Phone 2 had the right lack of features: no email, no social media, no internet browser or any other apps, so it made the first step in my process easy to achieve.

My smartphone became the equivalent of the Gateway desktop PC I had as a teenager: a device kept in another room that I had to physically go to if I wanted to get online. Within a week of using the Light Phone, my total smartphone usage dropped from four hours a day to under an hour a week — and it stayed there. By not using a single device for everything, I reintroduced some of the same technological friction that we had at the turn of the 21st century. 

The Light Phone took some getting used to. The GPS has improved tremendously in the last year. (I’m no longer afraid of getting lost and puking in my car.) Texting is still frustrating because of the slow E Ink screen, so now I call my friends more often — on the Light Phone or on video from my computer if they’re abroad. It was also awkward at first explaining to family and friends why I couldn’t immediately check my Instagram when they sent me a funny meme or why I couldn’t see a picture they texted. The Light Phone doesn’t support MMS or hyperlinks in texts. Instead, it forwards those messages to my email. 

I used to consider this an inconvenience, but reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World helped me understand what my quest to disconnect was about: reconnecting with the physical world. It doesn’t mean becoming a luddite, but to limit all the ways our phones distract us from the things that truly matter. This one sentence in his introduction brought everything full circle: “They agreed with my arguments about office distractions, but as they then explained, they were arguably even more distressed by the way new technologies seem to be draining meaning and satisfaction from their time spent out of work.” Someone finally put into words the deep pit of despair my smartphone dragged me into.

I haven’t been able to completely ditch my smartphone. I keep it in my bag in case I need it for certain things, like restaurant QR codes, authentication apps to log in to my work accounts, and Slack when I’m traveling for work. But I have started buying digital albums again and uploading them to my Light Phone like the good ol’ iPod days. (Later, Spotify.) I can get calendar reminders, listen to podcasts, call, and text. My smartphone no longer has a data plan, so if I do need to use it, I tether to the Light Phone’s built-in hotspot. More often, though, I use the hotspot with my Kobo so I can borrow library books on the road. My life is so much simpler and so much more focused than it was a year ago because I intentionally made it harder for myself to get distracted by my phone.

Some critics say the Light Phone isn’t worth the price because it doesn’t have the same number of features as a budget smartphone. To them, I ask: what is the price of your happiness? I don’t know what mine is, but it’s definitely worth way more than $339.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge