Dear readers, I have a confession: I suffer from an ailment that calls the younger 'brain rot', the inability to deep after too much after thinking too much on my phone. Nowadays it is difficult to even finish a book.
Many people have this problem. So much, it has born a category of minimalist tech products that want to rid us of distraction, from the AI -pin, the now displayed artificially intelligent raps that made notes, to phones with only basic characteristics.
The last example, the $ 600 Light Phone III, of a start-up from Brooklyn, is a stripped phone that barely does anything. The latest version, which started with shipping in March and is set to a broader release in July, can post calls, text, take photos, show card instructions, play music and play podcasts and do not do much else.
There is no web browser. There is also no App Store, which means that there is no uber to cry a lift, no play and no social media. There is not even e -mail.
“You use it when needed, and when you give it back, it will disappear into your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the Chief Executive of Light, the start-up that has developed several iterations of the light phone in the past nine years. “We get a lot of customers who tell us that they feel less stressed, they are becoming more productive, they become creative.”
I was curious if the light phone could heal me from brain rot, so I used it for a week as my primary phone. There were times when I enjoyed it. In anticipation of a train, resting in the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen and I felt more aware of my environment. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The Maps app has done great to navigate me in the city.
It reminded me of simpler times when we mainly used telephones to conversive before they set them up to concentrate on other tasks.
But during the week the disadvantages of a stupid phone ran to my pleasure, and about everything I felt more stressed and less capable. I noticed that suddenly I was unable to enter a train station, seek the name of a new restaurant or to control my garage door.
Part of it has less to do with the light phone itself, which is such a product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone functions.
This is how my week went shopping, commuting and going out with a lower phone.
Gets to work
When I set up my review unit of the Light Telefoon during the weekend, the phone, which looks like a black rectangular plate, was pretty bare bones. The phone menu was a black screen with a list of white text with the functions: 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 functions such as a card -app, notebook and timer.
Now that I was ready to go, I was determined to live, at least for a while, without my iPhone.
Commute to work
On Monday morning I started my home -working traffic and took a train from Oakland, California, to 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 physical transit pass, the Clipper card, into a virtual that was stored in the mobile wallet of my smartphone.
The light phone was missing a mobile wallet to load the virtual transit card, so I went back home sheep to get my iPhone and finally came to the office half an hour late.
Go to the gym
One evening I came up with a similar snag in my rock -climbing gym. To come in, members use their phones to log in to the website of the gym and to generate a temporary bar code scanned at the entrance. Because the light phone missed a web browser, I couldn't make a barcode, so I had to wait in line at the reception.
Friends SMS and Take photos
I added some of my best friends to the address book on the Light Phone and sent them SMS messages in which my experiment was explained. Typing on the keyboard of the device felt partly slow because there was no autocorrect function to repair typing errors. As a result, conversations were short.
Hilarity followed when I sent people photos. Poorly lit and grainy, the images looked like they were produced with a telephone camera from at least 15 years ago.
“Retro!” A friend said in response to a blurry photo of my daughter.
“Wow, that's bad,” said another friend about a poorly lit photo of my Corgi, Max.
The founders of Light said they were proud of the light telephone camera, which has a nostalgic feeling.
Go shopping
One afternoon I had to deposit an Amazon return in an UPS store. I opted for the most useful shipping option, where a QR code was shown for scanning.
The problem? The light phone had no e -mail app or web browser to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on my computer screen and made a mediocre photo with the phone.
When I brought the package to UPS and presented the photo, I held my breath, hoping that the image was clear enough. The UPS employee kept the scanner up and after three attempts I heard a beep and a shipping label printed.
What a relief, but also, what a hassle.
Lunch date
On another afternoon my wife and I went out for a spontaneous lunch date. I supported the car and then had to ask my wife to use her iPhone to close our garage door with the Myq app. (Our physical garage door opener no longer worked years ago.)
Then we tried to remind the name of a new sushi restaurant that we had recently read on a food blog. I could not help the blog post to dig up on the light phone. Eventually we gambled and ended up in the wrong restaurant. However, it was nice to have lunch together without the temptation to check my e -mail.
Bottom Line
Although I admire the goal of the light phone, my experience shows that there is nothing that we can do or buy realistic to bring ourselves back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including dealing in the city, working, paying for things and controlling household appliances, revolve around our very capable smartphones.
This light telephone experiment reminded me of Glamping: paying a lot for an artificially misvered experience.
I can't think of many people whose jobs would make them realistically use a light phone as their only phone. Too much of our trust in tools such as Slack and Email to communicate.
The light phone is perhaps better suited as a secondary leisure time telephone, similar to a weekend car, for people to disconnect when they are not working. But even then the camera quality can be a dealbreaker for some.
Mr Tang, the Chief Executive of Light, acknowledged that the light phone was not for everyone, but added that parents considered buying the phone so that their children are distracted less at school. The company is also working on adding more tools, such as mobile payments and the possibility to request a Lyft car.
