LIGHT PHONE 2 - A Minimal Phone for Digital Detox

remember the days before we started spending four or five or even six hours a day on our phones and the days before the infinite scroll of Instagram or tick-tock or almost any other app enter the all new light phone to a credit card sized companion phone with an e-ink touchscreen display a Wi-Fi hotspot calling texting and the essential tools in a phone that actually respects you [Music] [Music] now phones are incredibly powerful and I love having a phone because it enables me to do more than I ever could I can go to other countries and take a picture of a menu in Chinese and read it in English but all of this comes with a cost now having a smart phone is extremely powerful but because we look at them so much companies compete for our attention and we find that we end up having more notifications more emails more just overall distractions in life and they try to suck us into using the phone longer the longer you stay on instagrams the more money they make and that's not to say it's bad but a lot of people are saying that because of that they're ending up having a lower quality of life cooler climate they compare themselves to Instagram models people find that they don't sleep well because they lay in bed and continue scrolling through for hours and hours now all these are reasons that the company I'm proud to talk about came out with their original phone the light phone the original light phone could actually only make phone calls and while some people really like this many found that it was very difficult to get by in the modern world by only making phone calls so the company decided to make a sequel the light phone to which I have right here which enables you to do a lot more than that with that being said this for most people will not be a total replacement phone for some minimalist maybe it will be but it's really intended to be a companion phone for most of us we're supposed to be able to have a second phone that if I want to maybe go to a baseball game with some friends or go to a concert or go somewhere that I want to be interacting with my friends and not have the distraction or the temptation of a smartphone in my pocket and so for that I will be diving into this in this video and figuring out whether or not this phone is actually a viable solution or if it's just an optimistic concept that isn't really quite refined enough yet I want to start off by giving you a physical tour of this device then I'll get into the interface of it and then after that I want to do some tests on here to see how well the microphone and speaker actually work and then finally I'll talk about the pros and cons that I found after using this phone for a week now right off the bat there are two colors this is the black one there's also a light gray version and the black one as you can see is definitely more of a medium gray as opposed to an actual black and that's because it's intended to blend in and match the e-ink display on the front now this is made out of some type of plastic possibly polycarbonate I'm not entirely sure but it feels relatively durable if I drop it I'm not worried about it breaking and on the top we have the power button next to the headphone jack the headphone jack admittedly I was concerned at first because I thought having a headphone jack for phone calls might mean that they don't have bluetooth fortunately that is not the case they do have bluetooth on here they've Wi-Fi and GPS Wi-Fi is interesting because even though this will never access the Internet it still has Wi-Fi so you can easily manage contacts from your maybe your laptop for example you can download contacts through Wi-Fi onto the phone which is very convenient on the right side we have three buttons we have a volume up volume down and a middle button which kind of acts as your menu button or your home button the interface is a little bit different than you're used to so I'll show you that later on now on the bottom we have a microUSB power supply which originally they did promised USBC but I believe they decided that would be too large so to keep the phone small they used a micro USB then they have a microphone right there and on the left side they have a SIM tray this should work with most major carriers and depending on who your phone carrier is you could be able to have a duplicate SIM meaning you have a sim in your in your smartphone as well as in this one and you can have the same number on both now for me I've just been transferring my sim over it's just been easier for me to do that instead of calling and figuring out how to get a duplicate sim it was just easier for me to do that on the front we have a speaker up top obviously then right next to that we have a small little sensor which is your ambient light detection which is actually very nice because in the in the daylight obviously e-ink is fine but at night it's really hard to see so this detects when it's too dark and it turns on a backlight and it is a touchscreen with haptic feedback as well so when you tap on something it does give you a nice little vibration so you feel it you know that you're it's responsive but let's get into the interface now and see what this phone does now admittedly this is an early version of it in the next rollout they said that they may bring some extra features so for now all we're really doing on here is we do have a hotspot so I'll show you where to get that in a second you can call you can text and there is an alarm on here but other than that you don't have too many features on this phone so right off the bat if you hit the menu button you get three options right there phone alarm and settings now phone of course is going to allow you to see all of your text and your calls in kind of a conversation view so if I go and tap on any single person you can see the text on either side along with the date as well as you'll see phone calls pop up there as well now when you're in the conversation view here you can call from the bottom left or you can go to the bottom right and send a message now sending a message brings up the keyboard the keyboard is not bad actually it turns sideways and while you don't have autocorrect and you don't have swipe texting so is a little bit slower the haptic feedback does make it easier to type believe it or not it does help when you know when you hit the letter and I've been pretty accurate I haven't really had many typos it just takes a little bit longer to send a message then going back if we hit the X on the bottom center that brings us back to the phone and you can scroll down so you can swipe to scroll and again being eating display it's a little bit slower of a refresh rate there so it's not going to be the fastest scrolling obviously but if we go to the bottom left and we go to the dial pad you can call any number you want you can add a contact from here and it's really pretty straightforward from there now hitting the menu button again will go back to the options we can go to alarm which it's very simple you just type in a single alarm from where I can tell you can only have one alarm at a time then lastly if we go down to settings there's surprisingly more settings than I thought considering there really are not many functions for this phone but you can turn airplane mode on or off you can change your notifications so that you know choose the dial tone or choose the tone for that so there's so much more to talk about with this phone than just what I can cover in this video so I'm actually using this for two weeks straight and I will make a video in the next week to tell you what I found from the first two weeks of this so if you want to see that make sure you go down and click the subscribe button and the Bell icon so you don't miss that video I found that the battery for me easily last two days although they say if it's under light use like very light use it could last they set up to seven I find that hard to believe so you go down to preferences and here you can change things with like general right there is going to change like the keyboard layout or your time layout then if we go back so the screen is usually very responsive sometimes it is a little bit slow in the corners we can go to phone we can go to display or passcode now display we can actually change this to invert the colors to look like a classic Kindle paperwhite where it's like a white with black text so either one works I prefer the one that blends in with the the phone screen a little bit better setting a passcode is a possibility then if we go down to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi this is where you get your hotspot and it is a 4G phone right here so that right there is what it looks like when you get a phone call you can either answer or reject it and that is the ringtone hey what's up alright alright cool I'll be right down so let's do a quick speaker test starting with my Galaxy S 10 for reference this is an audio test and now a speaker just with the light phone now this is a microphone test I'm talking on the lights on right now so let's see how it sounds so as you can tell the speaker is clearly not as loud and neither the microphone nor the speaker are the same quality as a flagship smartphone but it definitely gets the job done so getting to some of the pros and cons I want to start with the pros here I think that it does have a semi premium feel it definitely felt better than I expected considering it's a small plastic device feels pretty durable and I'm not worried about that I do like the headphone jack that's definitely a big plus the Wi-Fi hotspot' is a huge one as well as the connectivity with Bluetooth and GPS so as they roll out more features on this I think that they will definitely be a very capable device for a lot of daily use this also is able to receive emojis but not pictures so if somebody's texting you and they send you a picture unfortunately there's no way for you to actually see that picture but like I said if you get emojis you I don't know how to send them on here but you can definitely receive them and see at least what other people are saying it does not have a camera which i think is both good and bad so other positives I like that text drafts are saved so if I type out a whole text and then I leave the screen and I come back the text is still there pretty standard but it's nice that they actually do have that and then it's also honestly pretty easy to type I thought it would be more difficult with this kind of weird keyboard layout and no autocorrect but realistically I had no problem typing except it just took a little bit longer so some of the cons obviously this is a very new style of phone so there are some bugs here and it's obviously not a smartphone as well so I can't judge it based on those criteria but what I found that could be fixed and and there are things that are a little bit of a small drawbacks here the first one is that there's no text navigation so if I type out a whole word and I'm changed I want to change the first letter I can't go back I have to hit backspace and delete the entire sentence or the entire word to change the letter that I want to also not receiving photos is a drawback because even if you take your sim out and put it in another phone you can tree receive the photo that's already there so I wish there was a way for maybe on light phone website or whatever to have it like redirect towards like an email or something so you could at least see that picture later on from a laptop there is some ghosting obviously that's normal with ei displays where if you go to the next to display or next screen you see a little bit of the previous screen but it does refresh every I don't know eight or ten letters you type or something like that so also you cannot switch to a second phone call or even get a notification so if I'm on the phone somebody calls me doesn't even ring and I have no idea they're calling so that's a weird thing right there I'll just get a beep and it'll tell me that I missed a call so if you go to their website you'll see that they did talk about adding a lot of features to this in the future including maybe uber on there or you could have like Google Maps to just navigate places they talked about having maybe ebooks or having a music player on here having a calculator having a timer and a stopwatch but right now it's tough to have so few features on a phone and get by on a day-to-day basis but regardless some of the things I would like to see on here that maybe they didn't mention I wish they had voice memos because it's kind of hard to tie up and take notes on here taking a voice memo I think would be a really nice way to just save reminders or shopping lists or whatever you need to do also I think an always-on display would be nice where it just tells you the time like all the time I think that would be great as an e ink display it shouldn't use that much energy and then lastly like I said I wish there's a way to see the photos online that people send to you so that you don't just lose them forever and have to text them and ask somebody to send it to email instead so overall guys this phone is $350 right now now obviously that is kind of a lot of money considering what it does calling texting a hotspot and alarm those were features 350s very steep but you have to keep in mind that this is a very early startup it's a brand new phone concept so I imagine as they increase their quantity and as they increase their their ability to do more on this phone it'll definitely drop in price an increase in features and it'll definitely become more worth it so right now it's really out there for early adopters for people that think it's a really cool idea and they want to back it so I'll drop a link in the description to go and get yours if you want but for most people I would say it's definitely a great concept but if you don't have an extra $350 it's very understandable that you'd maybe want to wait a little bit until they add more features and until they drop the price even just a little bit so guys I thought this was a very interesting phone and I'm very excited to talk about it more in my next video so make sure you subscribe and click the like button if you enjoyed this video as always guys thank you all for watching I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Mike O'Brien

Views: 371,618

Keywords: lightphone 2, lightphone2, light phone2, light phone 2, light phone, minimalist phone, digital detox, digital detox phone, no social media, are phones bad for us, e-ink phone, e ink phone, small phone, smallest smartphone, dumb phone, light phone reviwe, light phone 2 review, mike obrien, Mike O'Brien

Id: IJU0QanUWik

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020