Dear readers, I have a confession: I suffer from a disease that calls younger “Hunting brain,” Inability to think deeply after too much shifting on my phone. These days it is difficult to even complete the book.
Many people have this problem. So much, the category of minimalist technological products was born that seeks to get rid of distraction, from AI PIN, now disappeared by artificially intelligent flap pin, which took notes, on phones with only basic features.
The latest example, Light phone 600 $ IIIFrom the Brooklyn start-up, there is a undressed phone that barely does anything. The latest version, which started transporting in March and is ready for a wider edition in July, can make calls, send lyrics, photograph, display instructions on the map, play music and podcasts, and do nothing else.
There is no web browser. There is also no app store, which means there is no Uber that absorbed driving, no sample and no social media. There is neither e -mail.
“You use it when you need it, and if you put it back, it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, CEO of Light, Start-up, who has developed more lighting phone iterations over the past nine years. “We get many customers who tell us that they feel less stressed, become more productive, become creative.”
I was wondering if a light phone could cure me with a brain rot, so I used it as my primary phone for one week. It was the times when I enjoyed it. When I waited for the train, resting in the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen and felt more on my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The Maps app did a great job that navigated me around the city.
It reminded me of the simpler times when we used phones primarily for conversation before we put them off to focus on other tasks.
But during the week, the disadvantages of a stupid phone went to my pleasure and despite everything I felt more stressed and less capable. Suddenly I found that I couldn’t get to the train station, seek the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door.
Some of them have less in common with the light phone itself, which is so the product, and more to do with the company as a whole became dependent on advanced smartphone functions.
Here’s the way my week was going, commuting and walking with a phone with lower technology.
We are starting
When I set my review unit of the light phone at the weekend, it was a phone that looks like a black rectangular board, quite bare bones. The phone menu was a black screen showing a list of its functions: phone, camera, photo album and alarm. To add other tools, I had to use a web browser on my computer to access the control panel, where I could install functions such as MAP applications, Notepad and Timer.
Now that I was ready to go, I was determined to live, at least for a moment, without my iPhone.
Commuting
On Monday morning I started commuting to work and led the train from Oakland, California to San Francisco. When I arrived at the station, I realized I couldn’t enter without my iPhone, because years ago I transferred my physical passage, Clipper card, virtual stored in my smartphone’s mobile wallet.
Light phone lacked a mobile wallet to load a virtual transit card, so I returned home to get my iPhone and finally showed up my office half an hour late.
Go to the gym
One evening I came across a similar hitch in my climbing gym. To enter, members use their phones to log in to the gym web and generate a temporary barcode that is scanned at the entrance. Because the light phone lacked a web browser, I couldn’t create a barcode, so I had to wait at the reception queue.
Friends of text texts and photography
I added some of my closest friends to the directory on a light phone and sent them text messages explaining my experiment. Writing on the device keyboard partially felt slow, because there was no automatic remedy function to fix typing. As a result, conversations were strict.
When I sent people photos, there was Veselí. Poorly lit and grainy, the pictures looked as if they were made by a phone camera at least 15 years ago.
“Retro!” One friend said in response to my daughter’s blurred photo.
“Wow, that’s bad,” another friend said about a weakly illuminated photo of my Corgi, Max.
Photographs taken by the Corgi, Max, looked poorly lit and grain.Credit…Brian X. Chen/The New York Times
Light founders said they were proud of a light phone camera that had a nostalgic feeling.
Running errands
One afternoon I had to drop from the Amazon return in the UPS store. I chose the most convenient transport option that included the display of QR code for scanning.
Problem? The light phone had no e -mail application or web browser to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on the computer screen and invented an average picture with the phone.
When I brought the package on the UPS and introduced a photo, I detained my breath and hoped the image was clear enough. The UPS employee held the scanner and after three attempts I heard a beep and a shipping label printed.
What relief, but also what problem.
Lunch date
The next afternoon my wife and I went to the date of improvised lunch. I supported the car and then had to ask my wife to use her iPhone to close our garage door with the application Myq. (Our physical garage door opener stopped working years ago.)
Then we tried to remember the name of the new sushi restaurant, which we recently read on the food blog. I couldn’t help dig a blog post on a light phone. In the end, we argued and ended up in a bad restaurant. But it was nice to have lunch together without temptation to check my e -mail.
Bottom line
Although I admire the goal of a light phone, my experience shows that there is nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including circumventing the city, work, paying things and controlling home appliances, revolving around our highly capable smartphones.
This light phone experiment reminded me of Glamping: pay a lot for having artificially artificially more experience.
I cannot think of many people whose work would let them realistically use a light phone as the only phone. Too many of us rely on tools like Slack Ae -mail, to communicate.
The light phone could be better suited as a secondary phone with a free time, a similar weekend car to get people disconnected when they are out of work. But even then, the quality of the camera may be for some circuit breaker.
Mr. Tang, CEO of Light, acknowledged that the light phone was not for everyone, but added that parents were considering buying a phone for their children to be less distracted at school. The company also works to add other tools such as mobile payments and the ability to apply for a car.
