The Light Phone is Your Simple Phone Away From Home

A pretty easy target for those who who bash millennials is our tendency to have our heads buried in our phones, updating our FaceSpaces and vlogging on our Tweeter accounts. As smartphones evolve to do more things, we’re using them more and more, so they’re not wrong. The Light Phone hopes to solve that problem.

The Light Phone isn’t designed to replace your phone, but instead be your phone away from home. It’s tiny, small enough (and designed) to fit in your wallet, and doesn’t do anything but make and receive calls. You know, like a telephone.

The Light Phone is actually a pre-paid GSM cell phone that works regardless of what carrier you have. It has its own phone number, but you can use their app to forward calls from your primary phone to the Light Phone, so you can get calls when out of the house while leaving your smartphone at home.

It’s designed to be as simple as possible, using a dot-matrix display and lasting up to 20 days on standby before it needs to be charged again.

I understand the appeal of the Light Phone, but I think it’s the wrong way to go about solving this issue. Like most people, I spend more time staring at my phone than I would like to, but if it really became a problem I would look into downgrading my phone, not purchasing an additional accessory.

More importantly, my smartphone exists to be taken out into the world, not left at home. When I’m home, I don’t use my smartphone for anything I could do on my PC, so all of my phone’s “smart” functions are used almost exclusively out of the house.

I do find it interesting how Light is trying to reestablish the idea of a home phone, something that’s gone away with the rising use of cellphones. In Light’s scenario, your smartphone would begin to function as a home phone, never leaving the house. It’s not my cup of tea, personally, but 955 backers (who have funded $120,302) prove that it’s a winner.