Minimalism stretched to the purpose of frustration

Like untold thousands and thousands of smartphone customers, I’ve a little bit of an issue. I’ve been attempting, with middling success, to be extra conscious about how I exploit my telephone. I’ll typically uninstall varied social media apps (however reinstall them later), and I’ve disconnected all my work instruments except I’m touring particularly for the job. I don’t play video games with out intention or doomscroll very a lot. However I nonetheless discover myself mindlessly reaching for it when there’s a second to fill, and I don’t love that behavior. I don’t suppose I’m fully hooked on my iPhone; my Display Time stats put every day utilization round two to a few hours. That’s lower than I’ve seen lots of people submit on social media, but it surely’s nonetheless important.

I’ve been intrigued by the Light Phone III since I first noticed some previews for it final yr. Because the title suggests, it’s the third telephone by Brooklyn-based startup Gentle, and the ethos stays the identical. It has no “infinite scroll” apps like electronic mail, social media, an internet browser or most the whole lot else that defines a contemporary smartphone. It’s designed for fast interactions so you possibly can decide it up, reply to a name or message, possibly get instructions or placed on a track after which get again to life. Nonetheless, there are a number of enhancements in comparison with prior Gentle Telephones that made it really feel much more viable to me. Particularly, there’s a digital camera, the display screen is OLED as an alternative of E Ink and the broader, extra responsive show is healthier suited to textual content enter. It additionally appears cool in a minimalist manner, and has some properly responsive bodily buttons in a world when these have gotten more and more uncommon.

I’ve been utilizing the $599 Gentle Cellphone III since late March, and my plan was to totally decide to it — however the practicality of doing so was surprisingly troublesome. Based mostly on my expertise, it’s going to be a troublesome promote for lots of people who use a smartphone for fundamentals or issues solely particular apps can ship. The Gentle Cellphone III isn’t fairly able to be most individuals’s solely gadget, however I want it may very well be.

The Gentle philosophy

On the whole, the Gentle Cellphone III jogs my memory somewhat little bit of the very first iPhone — a tool with possibly 16 built-in apps and nothing else. After all, the iPhone had time-wasters like YouTube, an electronic mail consumer and an internet browser, however that gadget was not almost the attention-hog that fashionable smartphones are. In the identical manner, Gentle picked particular instruments that it feels most individuals will want whereas preserving the whole lot as easy and bare-bones as potential. The concept is that as an alternative of a tool crammed with apps continuously notifying you and attempting to seize your consideration, the Gentle Cellphone is targeted on intentional use so that you aren’t continuously selecting up your telephone.

That reveals up in a wide range of methods, from the fundamental block kind issue to the truth that LightOS (based mostly on Android, however you’d by no means realize it) is actually white textual content on a black background. The one time you see shade is in the event you open the digital camera or have a look at images. However a very powerful factor is the extraordinarily fundamental set of instruments you possibly can set up on the gadget. Right here’s a full checklist along with the settings and telephone / textual content messages apps:

• Alarm

• Album

• Calculator

• Calendar

• Digital camera

• Instructions

• Listing

• Hotspot

• Music

• Notes

• Podcasts

• Timer

If you would like, you possibly can actually simply have the telephone app, which additionally consists of your contacts checklist and textual content messages. In 2025, that’s wildly sparse. And you’ll see by the above checklist that none of those are stuff you’re going to lose numerous time utilizing. The austere method doesn’t simply apply to the restricted set of instruments, both — it reveals up in how each is designed. For instance, the Alarm device doesn’t have a sleep button. When you’re utilizing it as a get up name, you had higher rise up when it goes off.

{Hardware}

Earlier than digging into what utilizing this odd little gadget is like, let’s run by way of its minimalist {hardware}. The Gentle Cellphone III is a chunky rectangle of a telephone that’s considerably shorter and thicker than what I’m used to. It’s 12mm thick, in comparison with 7.8mm for the iPhone 16e or about 10mm for the Pixel 9a. However whereas the Gentle Cellphone III is about the identical width as a contemporary iPhone, it’s solely 106mm tall, which is shorter than, say, the iPhone 16e (147mm). That makes the telephone look rather a lot bigger in photographs than it’s in actuality, as a result of we’re used to assuming a telephone features a 6-ish inch show. That’s not the case right here.

The entrance is dominated by the display screen, however I haven’t used a telephone with a show this small in years. It’s a 3.92-inch AMOLED panel with matte glass and 1,080 x 1,240 decision, and the remainder of the entrance is crammed out by two massive bezels. The highest one homes an earpiece and selfie digital camera, whereas the underside has a surprisingly solid-sounding speaker. On the again, you’ll discover the modest 5-megapixel digital camera with a flash; the underside 60 p.c is the place the user-replaceable battery lives.

One other factor that makes the Gentle Cellphone stand out is its plethora of buttons, which is a rarity within the fashionable period. There’s an influence button with a fingerprint sensor on the highest proper nook, however sadly that sensor hasn’t but been activated in LightOS. The appropriate aspect has a house button, with round quantity up and down keys surrounding it. Close to the underside proper edge is a two-stage digital camera button, which is a reasonably stunning inclusion. Urgent it opens the digital camera app it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, and you’ll push it midway all the way down to activate the middle focus level earlier than miserable all of it the best way to take your image. Lastly, on the higher left nook is a button that activates the flashlight; it’s surrounded by a dial you possibly can flip to regulate display screen brightness. I’ve by no means felt like I wanted my telephone’s flashlight sufficient for it to have a devoted button, and of all of the buttons that is the one I by chance activated probably the most. However, the dial for display screen brightness is fairly useful.

The Gentle Cellphone is powered by Qualcomm’s SM 4450 processor with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of inside storage. It additionally helps 5G networks along with LTE, and the telephone is rounded out with the standard array of sensors: GPS, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC. And, in fact, there’s a USB-C port on the backside for charging and restricted connectivity with a pc.

For the reason that Gentle Cellphone’s battery is detachable, it’s not almost as massive as those you’ll discover in most fashionable smartphones. You’ll naturally be doing rather a lot much less with this telephone, although, so it’s not an enormous downside. I simply received a number of days of use from the Gentle Cellphone except I used to be utilizing navigation rather a lot. That drained the battery fairly shortly, so in the event you intend on utilizing it to your GPS on an extended automotive journey, be sure you have a charging port for it whilst you drive.

Going Gentle

Establishing a Gentle Cellphone III entails going to a web-based dashboard the place you’ll activate your telephone. As soon as that’s performed, that is additionally the place you possibly can configure varied instruments and do issues like add music and podcasts. There are minimal settings to fiddle with on the telephone itself — you possibly can alter quantity for varied notifications just like the telephone ringer, alarms or media, or flip the hotspot on or off. There are the standard choices for managing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections or updating the software program, but it surely’s a far slimmer menu than you’ll discover on an iPhone or Android gadget.

From the dashboard, I added the entire Gentle Cellphone’s out there instruments and dug into the method of transferring contacts and music over. I hoped that the telephone would simply present up as a USB gadget once I plugged it into my pc so I might drag some MP3s over, however, alas, that’s not the case. Managing content material on the Gentle Cellphone requires utilizing the dashboard; it reveals each device you might have put in and clicking on them allows you to add songs or import contacts.

This was the place I hit my first main friction level. I really like music and am a bit obsessive over it, so having the ability to play songs on the go is completely essential to me. I nonetheless purchase music on Bandcamp generally and now have an enormous library of MP3s from the pre-streaming days, so I had loads of tunes so as to add to my Gentle Cellphone. Certain, it wouldn’t be the identical as getting access to the thousands and thousands of songs on Apple Music or Spotify, however I used to be okay with a little bit of a philosophical swap. In any case, what number of songs do you really want at a time?

Seems the large difficulty isn’t having fewer songs — it’s how minimal each the music participant and track uploader are. On the dashboard, you possibly can add songs out of your pc, however all of them get dumped in a single big playlist. You’ll be able to re-order issues there, however that’s the one semblance of group. I had hoped that the Gentle Cellphone’s music participant would have an iPod kind of interface so you would use tags to dig into artists and albums, however no such luck. You’ll be able to seek for a track, and in the event you faucet it to play it’ll play the whole lot following — that was the one manner I might approximate the expertise of listening to an album.

Making issues much more difficult is the truth that songs aren’t essentially uploaded to the telephone in any semblance of order. So even when your information are correctly named, that ordering isn’t all the time mirrored within the last add. I resorted to including an album after which utilizing the online dashboard interface to verify the songs have been within the correct order. That’s worse than the expertise I had utilizing an iPod in 2003. To have to do that in 2025 is wild.

To be truthful, the Gentle Cellphone creators informed me that this software program is a holdover from the Gentle Cellphone II, which might solely maintain 1GB of music, like an previous iPod Shuffle. It wasn’t actually meant for looking a big library, however as an alternative was simply meant to offer you a fast choice of tunes in a pinch. And the corporate is actively engaged on a brand new participant with artist/album sorting, customized playlists and letting you load information through USB-C. That will go a great distance in direction of making it extra helpful. The excellent news is that sound high quality was nice and I might pair my AirPods Professional with zero points.

One other fear I had was how the Gentle Cellphone’s mapping and navigation instruments would maintain up. I’m perpetually misplaced and in addition lately moved, so I typically depend on turn-by-turn to determine the place I’m going. Whereas the Instructions device is kind of fundamental, it’s sufficient to get the job performed. Opening it up merely reveals two fields to enter the place you’re and the place you’re going (it could additionally pull your present location through GPS). There’s additionally a selector for whether or not you’re driving, strolling or utilizing public transportation. Whereas the latter two choices mainly simply return a listing of instructions, driving provides you a correct map view and navigation alerts. After I used it whereas driving round, the map view was principally clear and the instructions have been correct sufficient to get me to my vacation spot. It’s all powered by Right here location companies, which have been round for ages and appear fairly good in my nook of the US.

Gentle pairs the Instructions device with a Listing that’s its one concession to the search-powered world we dwell in. You’ll be able to seek for common phrases (espresso) or specifics (Starbucks) and get a ramification of outcomes. Tapping on them reveals some fundamental data just like the deal with, hours, telephone quantity and a fundamental description, and you’ll faucet the map icon to ship that place into the Instructions app. All of it works higher than I anticipated for getting round, although each Google and Apple Maps are higher at supplying you with real-time updates on public transit. I depend on real-time knowledge for metropolis buses, which makes the straightforward transit choices on the Gentle Cellphone a bit onerous to regulate to.

This ethos unsurprisingly permeates each device on the telephone. As I discussed earlier, the Alarm has no snooze button, however you possibly can set a number of alarms. You’ll be able to sync your Google calendar to the telephone. However in case you have just a few calendars in your account (work, household, and so forth.), you possibly can solely see the default one. There’s a fundamental Notes app, however you possibly can’t do issues like connect images to entries. I can’t say I’ve an issue with any of this, as a result of that’s the entire level of the Gentle Cellphone — you realize limitations are a part of the equation getting into.

There are two essential options I haven’t gotten to but: the digital camera and the telephone. That is the primary Gentle Cellphone with a digital camera; there’s a 50-megapixel one on the again (photographs are binned and output at 12 megapixels) and an 8-megapixel one on the entrance for selfies. The company’s blog reveals off a bunch of samples and talks in regards to the course of they’ve used to tune the digital camera’s output. Suffice it to say that these photographs are wildly completely different from the closely processed outcomes you’ll get from most fashionable smartphones. In good gentle, the Gentle Cellphone’s images look first rate sufficient however clearly lack the wonderful element we’re used to nowadays. It’s the form of digital camera that you should use in a pinch, however you’ll discover it missing in the event you’re in any respect severe about pictures.

For me the difficulty is much less in regards to the picture high quality, which has its personal lo-fi allure, and extra in regards to the digital camera’s responsiveness. Gentle included a devoted digital camera button, making it exceedingly easy to shortly shoot a picture. However, after you have your scene framed up and press the shutter button, it takes between one and three seconds for the digital camera to really take the photograph. That’s an eternity and it makes the digital camera not possible to make use of for something the place motion is concerned. I’m glad the Gentle Cellphone III has a digital camera. Nevertheless it brings me again to a time when telephone cameras have been helpful however crammed with compromises. I might dwell with the aesthetics of the pictures if the digital camera was extra responsive, however the lag simply kills it. If I used the Gentle Cellphone full time, I’d most likely use my correct digital camera far more typically — which may be an excellent factor! However I’d undoubtedly miss the comfort of taking high quality images in a pinch from my telephone.

Utilizing the Gentle Cellphone as a telephone

Some 15 or 20 years in the past, cell telephones have been principally meant for speaking and texting, keep in mind? The Gentle Cellphone III is a superb gadget for telephone calls, and a mediocre one for texting. In my testing, calls have been clear and straightforward to listen to on each ends, and the built-in speaker is surprisingly usable once you don’t really feel like holding one thing up (please, cease utilizing speaker telephone a lot in public, folks!). The contacts part of the app is, in fact, minimal: simply names and telephone numbers. As such, this can not exchange an deal with e book or fashionable contact checklist. For most individuals I care about, I have to retailer at the least a telephone quantity, deal with and electronic mail. There’s in fact no want for an electronic mail deal with on the Gentle Cellphone, however an deal with subject can be nice so you possibly can shortly pull up instructions to a good friend’s home.

If the Gentle Cellphone’s music participant was a letdown, attempting to textual content was the deadly flaw that killed my dream of utilizing this gadget full time. In comparison with the Gentle Cellphone II, this new mannequin is considerably simpler to textual content with. The extra responsive and wider OLED display screen means the keyboard is comparable in dimension to those you’ll discover on an iPhone or Android gadget. The messaging app additionally does some sensible issues, like robotically sending hyperlinks and images folks share to your electronic mail deal with so you possibly can have interaction with them in your pc.

However there’s no autocorrect. And in the event you haven’t tried to textual content on a telephone with out autocorrect currently, let me inform you — it sucks.

The web is filled with folks complaining about weird autocorrect errors, however what goes unnoticed is the way it hangs out within the background truly makes nearly all of our messages far clearer. If I attempt to textual content at a pace much like that on my iPhone, my messages are riddled with typos. Even once I decelerate it’s nonetheless very simple to misfire, necessitating irritating edits to make things better. There’s a spell-check function in-built, so phrases that I biffed have been at the least underlined. A protracted press on them gave me just a few choices to right issues, however the time it took me to compose and ship messages was considerably longer than on a contemporary gadget. The keyboard format itself is okay and took little time to regulate to, however I by no means felt snug as a result of I used to be all the time making and fixing errors.

The opposite half of this difficulty is extra philosophical. Again within the day, we used texts to ship fast updates to folks; having prolonged conversations was not the norm. That modified even earlier than the arrival of smartphones and I’ve associates whose pace at texting utilizing T9 was spectacular. However nonetheless, telephones simply weren’t meant for that. At this level, although, whether or not it is in WhatsApp or Telegram or Sign or your telephone’s built-in messaging system, we now have ongoing conversations that go together with us in every single place.

The Gentle Cellphone is a return in direction of utilizing messaging for fast check-ins and updates, maybe as precursors to an precise telephone (or in-person!) dialog. However belief me once I say that maintaining with a gaggle dialog will likely be an train in frustration with the Gentle Cellphone. I can dwell with the minimalist interface, restricted emoji choice and lack of ability to ship something moreover plain textual content and images if I might kind quicker — however I can’t. You’ll have to basically re-think your relationship with how you employ messaging on a telephone.

Which is form of the purpose of this complete train.

Breaking an dependancy

I can blame the music participant or lack of autocorrect, however in the end I used to be not prepared for the way radically completely different the Gentle Cellphone III expertise is. There have been a bunch of sensible issues that saved me from totally shopping for in. I want two-factor authentication apps for lots of companies I exploit. If I needed to go to a live performance, I’d want a smartphone for tickets. I don’t cope with checks typically, however I can’t keep in mind the final time I deposited one at a financial institution as an alternative of on my telephone. I’m happening trip quickly and need to have the ability to take good images with out dragging my digital camera round.

I might determine the mandatory work-arounds for nearly all of these items. Perhaps the up to date music participant Gentle is engaged on can be sufficient for me when it comes out. I’d most likely get used to the keyboard finally, to a point. I might use my “actual” digital camera extra, most likely main to higher and extra considerate images. I might get a piece telephone by way of our guardian firm to make use of for authentication.

The purpose is that whereas there are methods round these items, implementing them entails a ton of labor. And sadly, now that eSIM has taken over, it’s not so simple as simply popping a SIM card into my iPhone if I wanted it for a few of these issues after which dropping it again within the Gentle Cellphone for day-to-day life. And since I wasn’t capable of totally give myself over to the Gentle life-style, I didn’t actually get to expertise its advantages in a serious manner.

However, for just a few weeks, I left my iPhone at residence once I left the home as a lot as potential and there was one thing liberating in regards to the full lack of notifications and common siren-call for consideration that I often cope with. It’s one thing that has caught with me at the same time as I shifted again to my iPhone for every day use. I won’t be prepared to totally break my dependancy to my smartphone, however as they are saying, step one is admitting you might have an issue.