A few years ago, the team at Light shipped the most smartphone-like device they’d ever created. The Light Phone III still kept to its minimalist, no-distractions ethos, but it was a phone-size rectangle with a phone-size touchscreen, a camera, and a number of other features. Some people loved having an almost-smartphone, but Kaiwei Tang, Light’s cofounder, says he started getting feedback he didn’t expect. Lots of users, particularly young ones, didn’t want a smartphone. More than that, actually: They didn’t even want something that looked like a smartphone. “We have users who tell us, ‘Hey, I hate smartphones. I don’t want to be seen using a smartphone,’” Tang says. Then they’d almost always ask for the same thing: a Light Phone, but a flip phone.
So Light made a flip phone, set to ship early next year. “The Light Phone in flip phone form” is even roughly the right way to think about it. This one comes in a bunch of colors – a big departure from the all-black Phone III — but keeps Light’s chunky vibes. There’s a 2.8-inch screen on the top half, but it’s not a touchscreen; all the interaction comes via the bottom half’s standard numberpad, D-pad, and function buttons. The whole thing is powered by a MediaTek MT8873 processor, 128GB of storage, and 6GB of RAM. There’s a USB-C port for charging, a headphone jack for headphones, a single camera on the back, a notification light on the front cover that glows when there’s something for you to see, and not much else.
Early in the process, Tang says, Light decided to really emphasize the flipping of the flip phone. The team opted not to put any kind of screen on the outside of the device, wanting to make sure you had to deliberately open up the device. Tang says he loved “this action of opening up your technology, and then you close it down and it goes away.”
He says the Light Flip is designed mostly as a second phone, not so much to replace your iPhone or Galaxy device entirely but to give you an easy way to leave it at home. That was the idea behind the Light Phone III, too, but that was a hard sell for a $699 device — Tang says most of the negative feedback he’s heard about the Phone III was about its cost. The Light Flip is comparatively priced to move: You can buy it for $299, or you can pay $39 a month for a Light Flip connected to Light’s cell service, and after 24 months, the phone is yours.
The software in the Light Flip is the same LightOS as the Light Phone III — Tang says the only thing this new device can’t do is tap-to-pay, since there’s no NFC chip inside. Everything else, from camera to notes to navigation, should work just the same. And as of recently, you can add to the device’s software yourself: Light recently released an SDK for its app “toolbox,” so you can write apps for your own device or submit them to a broader app library.
Letting other people write Light software is a long time coming. Some Light Phone III users resorted to hacking full-fledged Android on the device, just to run the apps they wanted. The whole thing seems to have taken Tang time to get used to. But he knows Light can’t build all the software people need, and he’s found a way to help users solve their problems without inflicting the solutions on everyone else. “You own the device,” Tang says. “You own your software at the same time. Obviously, I don’t want to see people using social media on our phone, but that’s my problem. That’s your phone, you should be able to do whatever you want.”
Tang says he expects developers will hack their AI agents into LightOS and will create ways to communicate with their OpenClaw-running Mac Minis at home. He’s not worrying about it, nor is he particularly interested in making it easier. “When I interview young people,” he says,
“one thing that never comes up? No one wants an AI button on their phone.” In fact, he says, it’s the opposite: More and more users want him to guarantee there’s no AI anywhere in the Light universe.
In a way, the Light Flip is a nod toward retro nostalgia, a long-gone era before our phones were huge screens that demanded all of our attention all the time. But Tang says he doesn’t see it that way — he thinks flip phones got thrown away far too soon. “This form factor, young people have never experienced it,” he says. “They love the idea of closing it, and it goes away.” As poll after poll shows people revolting against the incursion of AI into their lives, and more and more people find themselves looking for a way out of their relationship with their smartphones and their feeds, Light Phone has decided to take on the smartphone not by trying to sneakily replace it but by building something that no one would ever mistake for a smartphone. That might be its best feature.
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