Can the use of the III light phone help cure “brain rot”?

Dear readers, I have a confession: I suffer from a disorder that the youngest calls “Brain put”, The inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on my phone. In these days, it is difficult to even finish a book.

Many people have this problem. So many, has given birth to a category of minimalist technological products that strive to get rid of distractions, from PineTHE deceased Artificially intelligent bavaglio pins that has taken notes, to phones with only basic characteristics.

The last example, the $ 600 Light Phone IIIFrom a Brooklyn start-up, it is a stripped phone that barely does nothing. The most recent version, which has started to send in March and is ready for a wider version in July, can make calls, send messages, take photos, show indications on the maps, play music and podcast and do not do much more.

There is no web browser. There is also no App Store, which means that there is no Uber to greet, no game and no social media. There is not even and -mail.

“You use it when necessary and when you put it back down, it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, a CEO of Light, the start that has developed multiple iterations of the bright phone in the last nine years. “We have many customers who tell us that they feel less stressed, become more productive, they become creative”.

I was curious to see if the light phone could take care of the brain of the brain, so I used it as the main phone for a week. There were moments that I had fun. While waiting for a train, resting in the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to fix the phone screen and I felt more aware of what surrounds me. The phone calls seemed beautiful and clear. The Maps app has done an excellent job for navigating the city.

It reminded me of simpler times when we used the phones mainly to converse before leaving them to focus on other tasks.

But over the week, the disadvantages of a more stupid phone cut my fun, and on everything that I felt more stressed and less capable. Suddenly I found myself unable to enter a railway station, look for the name of a new restaurant or check my garage door.

Some of these have less to do with the light phone itself, which is such a product, and more to do with the way the company as a whole has become dependent on the advanced functionality of smartphones.

Here’s how my week went for commissions, moving and leaving a lower phone.

Start

When I set up my light phone review unit during the weekend, the phone, which looks like a black rectangular slab, was quite naked. The phone menu was a black screen showing a list of white texts of its features: telephone, camera, photo album and alarm. To add more tools, I had to use a web browser on my computer to access a dashboard, where I could install features such as an app maps, blocker and timer.

Now that I was ready to leave, I was determined to live, at least for a while, without my iPhone.

Pendularism at work

On Monday morning I started my journey to work, taking a train from Oakland, California, San Francisco. When I arrived at the station, I realized that I could not enter without my iPhone because years ago I had converted my passage of physical transit, the clipper card, in a virtual stored in the mobile wallet of my smartphone.

The light phone was missing from a mobile wallet to load the virtual transit card, so I went home to get my iPhone and eventually introduced myself to the office in the office.

Go to the gym

One evening I came across a strange similar in my climbing gym on rock. To enter, the members use their phones to access the gym website and generate a temporary bar code that is scanned at the entrance. Since the light phone was missing from a web browser, I couldn’t create a bar code, so I had to wait in line at the reception.

Send messages and take photos

I added some of my closest friends to the address book on the light phone and I sent them text messages that explain my experiment. Type the device keyboard was slow in part because there was no automatic correction function to correct beating errors. As a result, the conversations were concrete.

Hilarity was followed when I sent people’s photos. Evil illuminated and grainy, the images seemed produced with a phone camera at least 15 years ago.

“Back!” A friend said in response to a blurred photo of my daughter.

“Wow, it’s bad,” said another friend on a scarcely illuminated photo of my Corgi, Max.

Light’s founders said they were proud of the light phone camera, which has a nostalgic atmosphere.

Execution of commissions

One afternoon, I had to leave a return of Amazon to a UPS shop. I chose the most convenient shipping option, which provided it showing an QR code for scan.

The problem? The light phone had no apps and -mail or web browser to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on my computer screen and I took a mediocre image with the phone.

When I brought the package to UPS and introduced the photo, I retained the breath, hoping that the image was quite clear. The UPS employee held the scanner and, after three attempts, I heard an acoustic signal and a printed shipping label.

What a relief, but also that drying.

Lunch date

On another afternoon, my wife and I went out for an improvised appointment for lunch. I placed the car and then I had to ask my wife to use her iPhone to close our garage door with the app Myq. (Our open of the physical garage door stopped working years ago.)

So, we were trying to remember the name of a new sushi restaurant we had recently read about a food blog. I couldn’t help digging the blog post on the light phone. In the end, we made a hypothesis and ended up in the wrong restaurant. It was nice, however, lunch together without the temptation to control my email.

In conclusion

While admiring the goal of the light phone, my experience shows that there is nothing that we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our life, including going around the city, working, paying things and controlling household appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.

This light telephone experiment reminded me glamping: paying a lot to have an artificially more crumm experience.

I can’t think of many people whose works would allow them to realistically use a light phone as the only phone. Too many of us rely on tools such as Slack and and -mail to communicate.

The light phone could be more suitable as a secondary free time phone, similar to a weekend car, so that people come off when they are out of work. But even then, the quality of the camera could be a deal for some.

Tang, Light CEO, recognized that the light phone was not for everyone, but added that the parents took into consideration the idea of ​​buying the phone for their least distracted children at school. The company is also working for the addition of multiple tools, such as mobile payments and the possibility of requesting a Lyft car.