Review: Light Phone III

“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 social media—less incentive to hold your phone in front of your face at a concert, so you can enjoy the show instead of posting about it to Instagram Stories.

The Light Phone III is a significant upgrade over its predecessor, shedding an E Ink screen in favor of a responsive OLED panel, a wider design that's friendlier for typing messages, better hardware all around, not to mention improved connectivity options. It also now commands a premium price—$599—a number that caused my dad to spit out his coffee when I told him. (The price could rise over the coming months due to tariffs.) But if there's a chance it could mitigate screen time woes, is it worth it?

Broader Connectivity

While Tang and his fellow cofounder Joe Hollier have completely replaced their smartphones with Light Phones, they don't think the Light Phone III needs to replace your smartphone. You can go that route if you're bold, or you can think of it as a second phone. Choose when you want that digital detox and leave the smartphone at home—you can easily transfer your SIM card between devices. There's also eSIM support, though switching this around could prove annoying based on your carrier.

There's only one global version now, so you can use the Light Phone III when traveling without connectivity issues. (This was a problem on the Light Phone II.) In the US, it's 5G/4G LTE certified on T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Boost, Mint, Ting, and US Mobile. You may be able to utilize a carrier service to share one phone number across multiple devices, like T-Mobile Digits, but few carriers have an option like this nowadays.

I'm on Google Fi, and since it's not supported, I couldn't completely ditch my smartphone during my testing period. (I could send but not receive texts.) I purposefully tried to avoid using it when I was out and about with the Light Phone III, but I needed it on hand to avoid missing calls or texts on my personal number. That said, I texted my Light Phone III phone number to a few family members and friends and asked them to save it. You can set up call forwarding, though it doesn't solve the texting issue. It's also important to know that there are no third-party messaging clients for the Light Phone III, so no WhatsApp or Signal.

My Little Phone-y

What exactly can this cute, boxy device do? Unsurprisingly it keeps things basic, with just a few utility apps and nothing more: You'll get Phone, Alarm, Album, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Directions, Directory, Hotspot, Music, Notes, Podcasts, and Timer. The 3.92-inch matte OLED screen, which is far more responsive than the E Ink on the Light Phone II, allows you to swipe through the vertical touchscreen interface. It's super fluid and smooth, no doubt thanks to the upgraded Qualcomm SM 4450 chipset inside with 6 GB of RAM.

On the left side of the device is a rotating knob that control's the screen's brightness. Press it and it'll turn on a bright flash, which I found useful as I was building a PC over the weekend in my dimly lit office. Over on the right are two volume buttons with a back button between them. Further below is a camera button—a half-press triggers the focus—and along the top edge is a power button.

The bottom grille is the stereo speaker, and the audio is surprisingly good—it can get decently loud! I had to relearn how to download music, but once I did, I uploaded a few albums, like GNX, through the Light Phone's web dashboard on my PC. (The phone has 128 GB of internal storage.) Unfortunately, there's no headphone jack, but you can use Bluetooth to pair wireless earbuds. It paired swiftly with my car's Bluetooth so I could pump out tunes or podcasts on rides. Speaking of, it's easy to add specific podcasts through the online dashboard, and you can force the Podcasts tool to sync on the device to get new episodes.

Microphone quality is also rock solid. I took multiple calls, and no one found my voice quality lacking. Even in the Notes app, you can either write notes or record voice memos, and my voice sounds clear, though I primarily recorded myself in relatively quiet environments.

The 1,800-mAh battery easily lasts around two days. If you play music or podcasts for several hours, that will drop down considerably. It charges via USB-C. Four screws on the back allow for easier battery replacements, though this means you get just an IP54 water resistance rating; fine in the rain, but don't drop it in water.

You'll probably use the Phone tool the most. Adding contacts was a quick affair on the dashboard via Google Contacts (you can upload a .VCF), and texting is so much nicer on this handset over its predecessor, thanks to the wider design—though there's voice-to-text if you still find it cramped. You can even attach images you've captured from the Light Phone III to convos.

The Directions tool is surprisingly helpful. It's powered by Here, and I successfully got Google Maps–style driving and walking directions. However, I have noticed that the built-in GPS is a little slow to find its position, especially indoors. There's a public transit option, though this is more akin to printing a set of directions from MapQuest.

I quite like the Directory. If you want to find a nearby coffee shop or look up the hours of a museum, type it in and you'll get a collection of details like hours of operation, contact information, and even a star rating (sometimes). You get quick options to navigate there via the monochrome map or to place a call.

On the back is a 50-megapixel camera paired with an 8-megapixel selfie camera. The results were better than expected, but that might be because I had low expectations. A smartphone of comparable value will easily trounce the photo quality of the Light Phone III, but I found myself enjoying the lo-fi look of these images. In low-light settings, you'll have to adjust the exposure compensation to get anything usable. Even then, it'll look super grainy, but that's in vogue, right? Right now, you have to hook up the Light Phone III to a computer and enable Media Transfer on the handset to transfer photos, but eventually they'll sync to the web dashboard.

Some hardware features aren't in use yet. For example, there's a fingerprint sensor baked into the power button, but it's not live (Tang says soon). There's NFC on the back of the device, and the hope is to add a tap-to-pay service akin to Apple Pay or Google Wallet. Eventually, the company wants to add video messaging capabilities for the selfie camera, though it's unclear what platform it would support.

While there aren't any third-party apps yet, Tang and Hollier talked up a potential partnership with Lyft to bring a ridesharing utility to Light Phone users. It's unclear when this would arrive, but the team of 15 people has been delivering a steady set of features to the Light Phone II for the past six years—many of the aforementioned tools debuted there through software updates, so they have a good track record.

High Price

The longer you use the Light Phone III, the more you'll think: Well, it'd be nice if they just added this feature. I've already thought up a handful, almost all for utility and not doomscrolling, mind you. Google Authenticator, for example, would allow me to log into certain websites if I only take my laptop and Light Phone III to the coffee shop to work.

This will never happen, but I'd love to get alerts from my security cameras in case something's wrong when I'm away. I know it doesn't have an E Ink screen anymore, but the ability to read ebooks would be nifty on this matte screen—the size makes it great for one-handed reading, and we all know how popular the Boox Palma 2 was last year. I'd also love a way to run basic searches (I don't want a web browser). Too often in group conversations, I'll say, “Oh, I'll look it up,” then stop what I'm doing and blankly say, “Never mind, can you?”

Everyone probably has one thing they'd like to see on this device, and if the developers catered to every need, this would turn into a smartphone quite quickly. The Light Phone III is a lesson in letting go and learning that you don't need access to that bus-load of apps every waking moment.

I reviewed the original Light Phone II in 2019 and said it's not the cure for smartphone addiction. Now? It absolutely is. But the price is a big problem. I understand why it's so expensive—it's a small team producing small batches, so there's no economy of scale. Some components are custom and not off the shelf, like the OLED screen, and Light Phone is planning on supporting the hardware for more than five years, meaning a continued stream of updates that require resources.

The good news is that the Light Phone II is still available, and it has many of the same software features, though it is not as user-friendly and responsive. Yes, you can buy a feature phone and enjoy the same levels of digital detox, but there's nothing quite like the Light Phone III. It might have sat in my pocket far longer than any other phone I've tested, but it has an aesthetic that makes me enjoy using it in those limited interactions. Best of all, it's given me more time to take care of a few things around the house this past week instead of scrolling through Instagram all day.