Yet another fight with an old enemy: my smartphone. Like millions of others, I too am tossed into the vortex of its disruptions, trying to be mindful about time and mostly failing. I reinstall social media apps only to uninstall them yet again. Work-oriented apps have been outright denied entry to my phone unless I take them along, which is rarely the case, for a work trip. I resist every lure of unmindful gaming and all the more doomscrolling. The fingers, however, continue their twitching, those fingers that would instinctively reach out to that glowing rectangle to fill any void. It is a habit I do not like. I would not call it a complete addiction; I am logging about two to three hours on Screen Time every day. Less, perhaps, than others, but still far enough to devour a good chunk of my day into that digital world.
The Light Phone III has piqued my curiosity since first rumored in 2023. From Light, Brooklyn, here is their third attempt at breaking humans free from their digital shackles. Imagine a phone stripped bare: no endless social media feeds, no abyss for emails, no rabbit holes of web browsers-only raw communication. It accommodates little things: it takes a quick call or a text, and then a little GPS here or there, or a tune for life… and back to real life. But the Light Phone III isn’t just a glorified reboot. It is a rebirth. Finally, the camera is in the mix. The grainy E Ink display is tossed out in favor of a bright OLED display. Typing is a lot less of a pain because the screen is wider and more responsive. And honestly, that minimalist beauty goes a long way. In a world where buttons are becoming almost extinct, those tactile and responsive keys are a welcomed mutiny. This is not a phone; this is an attitude.
For weeks, the Light Phone III has been my exercise in digital detox, setting the goal of total smartphone severance and the surprisingly tangled reality of daily needs. While the Light Phone III whispered promises of a simpler life, its limitations yelled of the opposite. Simple must-haves for any smartphone and requirements for others depending on certain apps became an unexpected hurdle. The verdict: almost, but not quite. And that just frustrates me to no end that I have to say it.
Light
Light Phone III
The Light Phone III: A stylish escape hatch from smartphone tyranny, but tread carefully, it’s a trade-off.
Pros
- A truly distraction-free experience
- Great call quality
- Touchscreen is clear and responsive
- Includes a useful set of built-in tools
Cons
- No autocorrect makes texting a chore
- Music player is extremely limited
- There’s a lot of friction switching to a minimalist phone
- Expensive
$599 at Light
The Light philosophy
The Light Phone III remembers the spirit of the original iPhone-conscious curation of tools, as opposed to endless distractions. Remember the first iPhone? Limited apps, nascent YouTube, crude browsers. Zen compared to today’s attention-exacting smartphones. Light carries this vision forward: selecting the very few functions that are needed and rejecting the irritating noise. To be used intentionally, as one might retreat from constant pings and notifications that enslave them to their own devices.
This understated philosophy goes into the phone from its bare-bones, bricklike design down to the barely recognizable LightOS. While based on Android, the interface is a monochrome study: white text starkly contrasted against black. Color erupts only when the camera lens comes out or when glancing at photos. But what truly defines the Light Phone II is the selectivity of its tools- a deliberate limitation of only essentials, along with settings, phone, and messaging.
- Alarm
- Album
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Camera
- Directions
- Directory
- Hotspot
- Music
- Notes
- Podcasts
- Timer
By 2025, a phone was seriously archaic if it just allowed calling, storing contacts, and texting. The premise was almost “don’t put time-sucking apps in there.” So the idea behind this phone is in austerity: not for what it contains but rather for what it purposely does not. Another refusal is given the alarm… No snoozing, for you! It’s either get up or suffer the consequences.
Hardware
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Forget sleek. Forget slim. The Light Phone III slips into your pocket like a brick from a simpler era daring you to carry something… unusual. Picture an iPhone that got shrunk in the wash, turning into a hefty palm-sized rectangle. At 12mm, it proudly bulges compared to wafer-thin iPhone 16e packing just 7.8mm or even thin-as-a-slice Pixel 9a at 10mm. Here is where the visual trickery happens: While its width feels familiar, its height measures a mere 106mm, which is roughly 4cm shorter than the iPhone 16e. This stubby height starts playing tricks on the mind. Photos enlarge it: The brain expects a full 6-inch screen. The Light Phone III just laughs at such expectations.
The front side of the phone has experienced a throwback. A very petite 3.92 inches AMOLED screen with matte glass protection glances back at one: a portal to yesteryears of compact devices. It does 1,080 x 1,240 resolution crisply but those bezels are no joke. An earpiece-and-selfie-camera-agencies-on-top. Below it, louder-than-expected speaker chambers are found. Fling the phone over and it’ll greet you with an understated 50-megapixel shooter with flash above the secret: the bottom half opens up to user-replaceable power.
The phone is a classic example; the tiny 3.92 inches AMOLED screen glare entered matte glass: a portal to an age of compact devices. But the 1,080 x 1,240 resolution is very crisp, limp bezels aside. Earpiece and selfie camera patrol these territories on top. More surprisingly, below the screen lies a solid speaker. Flip it around, and a discreet 50-megapixel camera with flash will greet you before the secret: half of the bottom side of the phone opens up to user-replaceable power.
Screw modern minimalism any more; the Light Phone is an all-out button gala. A power button (with a napping fingerprint sensor currently) sits top-right; the entire right flank was home to a home button with a playful ring of volume controls around it. But wait a second: an actual two-stage camera button down there? An unexpected retro throwback, this one is strangely welcome. One press calls the camera app to the fore regardless of whatever else is going on, half-press to focus, full press to snap the picture. Over on the left is a flashlight button, with the screen brightness dial guarding it. While the flashlight button rings a little much with its eagerness, the brightness dial is an appreciated addition.
Dripping in sleek and minimalist looks, the Light Phone III holds sufficient power under its hood to allow you some fun. The Qualcomm SM 4450 processor, waking side by side with 6GB of RAM, a mighty 128GB storage hard drive, ensures the phone operates smoothly and responsively. Moving into the future, the phone is graced with lightning-fast 5G alongside LTE. It has the usual finds: GPS, Bluetooth 5.0, and NFC, to add to its jar of tech goodies. Charging and data transfer through USB-C are another pair of conveniences that this device guarantees.
The Light Phone’s battery is small, a conscious design trade-off for the minimalist design. Do not fret about capacity. This is not some pocket computer that requires charging at the drop of a hat. I remember squeezing days out of it with only one charge, just to relinquish myself from the tyranny of hunting down a wall socket. Except for GPS-navigation, the navigational charging would drain the Battery, as if thirsty travelers in the desert road trip workers, charge it; otherwise, go off-grid with your wandering.
Going Light
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
The Light Phone III experience begins online, at your personal dashboard. Think of it as mission control: activate your phone, load up on music and podcasts, and fine-tune your tools. On the device itself? Simplicity reigns. Volume controls for calls, alerts, and tunes, a hotspot toggle, and the essentials-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and software updates. Ditch the endless menus; this is focus, distilled.
If the Light Phone III were merely a fullscreen Apple ][, which basically it is, your happiness will stem from the absence of menus. This is truly a joy.
The minimalist Light Phone dashboard established cool vibes from my digital workbench. It longed to be filled with contacts and tunes. My original expectation of a simple drag-and-drop operation through USB was soon dashed. Do not expect your typical USB drive. The dashboard is the keeper. It presents each installed tool as a neat list and allows one click options to upload music or import contacts.
There’s where the minimalist experiment hit a brick wall, I consider music as air for me; it is almost life itself. The possibility of life unplugged from these never-ending streams really caught my fancy. A curated collection seemed to be just perfect for me as the modern-day Thoreau. After all, how many songs do you reallyneedwhen you are surrounded by silence? I am the kind of person who still buys music, and I have accumulated gigabytes upon gigabytes of MP3s throughout the years, more than enough for a desert island, so definitely load my Light Phone float. It wouldn’t be a Spotify, but that was fine by me, maybe, that was the point.
So, the real issue is not the limitation on songs, but rather the thin design of the music player. Uploading is like a song going down the digital drain-an enormous unorganized playlist. Reorganize it is all that you can do to keep order. I pictured a slick iPod-style interface where artist and album tags would open up the sonic world for further application. Instead, I’m left with a rudimentary search feature. The closest thing I get is to press on a song and pray for the rest to play in order-which is far removed from the professionally curated listening experience I desired.
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Imagine hopping into a time machine, only to find your musical apparatus thrown to the Stone Age. And that is how I feel trying to load songs onto this phone. Gone are the days of neatly organized playlists; it is more like a deep digital free-for-all. My meticulously named tracks? Forced into a blender that liquefies them into sound anarchy. Then I’m left to manually going through this horrendous web interface, painfully drag-and-drop-wise, to assign each song. It’s not just inconveniencing; it really is a pangress in technology. I haven’t had real frustration with music management since the days of the 2003 iPod. And doing this in 2025? That’s just insanity.
Okay.
For real, Light Phone’s music player sure felt much of a bygone era of iPods Shuffle. A gigabyte storage capacity-a real great time capsule for music as opposed to an up-to-date library. But don’t dismiss it just yet; the people at work for sure. The new player will have artist and album sorting; new playlists will be made manually; and loading will be done through USB-C. Imagine that! Potentially, this bare-bones beauty might become an excellent on-the-move audio sector. On the brighter side, the sound performs way beyond its rating, and my AirPods Pro connected without a hitch. So, there’s potential. Let’s see if they will make good on it.
My biggest fear about ditching my smartphone for the Light Phone? Getting hopelessly, eternally lost. I am geographically challenged, a newcomer recently arriving into town in the world, and I have used GPS like a toddler uses a security blanket. The Light Phone’s “Directions” tool seemed… minimalist. Bare bones. But, it really seems to be working. Enter your origin and destination (or it can grab your current location via GPS), select your transport type (drive, walk, or public transit), and away you go. Walking and public transit offer simple text instructions, with the option to choose them on-screen, but chose driving and you get actual map-based turn-by-turn directions. Under the hood, it is powered by Here location services, a well-trusted player in the mapping arena. Driving about, the map was clean and clear, and the directions, thankfully, kept me on the road. Fear not, maybe this minimalist phone wouldn’t leave me on my own.
With “Directions,” a tiny route plotting app, Light’s offering a minimalist navigation experience cleverly coupled with a “Directory” of sorts. Think of it as a little wink to the search-driven universe. Looking for some caffeine? Type “coffee.” Craving a Starbucks? Type it in. The Directory surprisingly spits out an all-around useful set of results. Tap one location to see the basics: address, hours, phone, and description. Another tap sends the place straight to the Directions app, ready to get you there.
While the somewhat lack of a real-time public transit wizardry of Google or Apple Maps (a very important feature for city bus lovers such as myself) makes it less useful, Light’s Directions does, in fact, work very well for basic navigation. Applying its limited transit options requires a slight mental shift-almost like giving a deep breath to the hungry feature-bloated alternatives.
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
This minimalist philosophy applies to every part of the device. No snoozing; the Alarm dares you to get up (multiple alarms serving as your companion here). Google Calendar syncs, but beware; only your main calendar gets through. The Notes app is just one place for words, unspoiled by images. That doesn’t even bother me, because in the first place, accepting it is the very promise of Light Phone.
Let’s talk cameras. The Light Phone III sets a precedent: a 50MP rear camera (binned down to 12MP) and an 8MP front shooter. Forget those cranked-up-to-11 hyper-real shots that your AI powers. They’re doing something different: natural with every minute detail enumerated on their blog.
The fruit of an idea? In reasonable light, usable pictures present themselves, albeit lacking razor-sharp detail that today’s flagships feature. Consider it the “just in case” camera. A serious photographer will be left wanting… But that, after all, is the whole point, isn’t it? It’s not about the perfect shot, it’s about the shot in the moment.
The camera on Light Phone III has some lo-fi charm in its images, but the unbearable lag destroys the charm. Smartly, Light had incorporated a dedicated camera button, promising instant snapshots. But wait: now there is this eternal pause between finally hitting that shutter and the camera fulfilling its act-and-go unbothered for about one to three painful seconds. Do not bother attempting to capture candid moments or anything involving motion because this camera is deafeningly slow.
I do appreciate a camera on the Light Phone III, because it somehow evokes a nostalgic feel of an era of compromised phone photography. I could have embraced the vintage look, except that the sluggish responsiveness kills everything. This type of lag would always have me reaching for my separate camera if Light Phone were my daily driver–one could call this a silver lining. However, the ability to take a decent, quick shot on my phone would be dearly missed.
Using the Light Phone as a phone
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Remember the days when phones were… just phones? If you want to look back at simpler times, the Light Phone is a calling device with some perceived drawbacks on the side of texting. Calls were clear on one end of the line, while the other end was reporting crisp talk; the speakerphone was decent enough for hands-free use, though, please, say no to bringing the speakerphone conversations into public spaces. This contact list is just refreshingly simple: names and numbers only. It’s certainly not something one can replace a Rolodex with. I need at least a phone number, an address, and an email for most of my contacts. Even though an email field hardly seems necessary here, one simple address field would be a godsend for rapidly getting directions to a friend’s place.
The Light Phone III music player was a real buzzkill, but texting was where my minimalist dreams went completely flat. Unlike the previous model, texting on this phone turns out not to be at all frustrating. The wider screen is packed with smarts: an OLED touchscreen surface with a keyboard that really does look something like a usable keyboard almost like on an iPhone! The messaging app in turn helps keep you grounded: shared links and photos get sent to your email automatically so you can actually get back into real-world digitalism on a computer.
Ask anyone the painful experience of typing on a phone that caught and displayed every typo! What sort of hell is this? Death to easy, flowing communication; prepare for hard manual-vocabulary thumb-wrestling against your will, wherein. Criminally, victory is a well-formed sentence. Believe me, it is as galling as it sounds.
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
We laugh at autocorrect fails, but let’s be honest: the software has saved us at least in instances from irreversible messaging mayhem. Colored by memories of trying to type hastily on the then-dating phone, my big thumbs would land on buttons generating typos. Not that slowing down would help either; typos would keep piling up, demanding constant, irritating edits. Still, there was spell-check underlining keyboard blunders. At the long press, I could summon a few choices of corrections, but whatever I was doing, I felt as if I would take ages to type that simple text. The keyboard was fine in layout, but my own ineptitude did put up a fight, making for a somewhat taxing experience. The feeling was never comfortable because I was always making and correcting errors.
Other than this digital coin flips into philosophy. Remember those digital telegrams of another time-quick bursts of information? Prose was for letters, definitely not phones. But something changed. Somehow, before the advent of smartphones, some of us had become T9 texting ninjas, clicking away whole chapters of our lives with numeric keypads. But the phones felt like message delivery systems, not incubators for conversation. Now, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and even your phone’s dumb SMS app are all bustling hubs of sprawling, never-ending conversations that follow us wherever we go, like digital shadows.
The Light Phone nurtures a beautiful nostalgia for simplicity: short texts as crumbs on a path to an actual connection-a bridge over voice calls or face-to-face conversations. Group texting, meanwhile, becomes an impossible endeavor. That minimalism is its charm-text messages only with a bare minimum of emojis. I could forgive the lack of features if only typing was not so painfully slow. So start preparing for a major wound to your messaging habits; brevity is not an option but an outright demand.
Which is kind of the point of this whole exercise.
Breaking an addiction
Granted, maybe the music player gets some blame, maybe no autocorrect. The real culprit? I was unprepared for the Light Phone III’s stark departure from smartphone life. It was beyond an exercise in penalizing distractions; practicalities kept coming up. My digital life is barricaded behind two-factor authentication, which the Light Phone simply says no to. Concert tickets? Dumb and dumber: digital, locked in a smartphone app. Remember checks? I’m pretty sure my bank thinks that I’ve moved to an entirely different planet since the last time I may have darkened their doorstep with a physical deposit. And then there’s said vacation – thoughts of gorgeous scenery forever imprisoned in grainy memories because carrying only a camera seems like a chore.
Workarounds? A challenge accepted. And that very thing just might get an itch scratched by Light’s new music player, and maybe I’ll even manage taming its keyboard beast. I resurrect the “real” camera? Hello, intentional photography. And if all that’s just too much, a work phone might just be my digital hall pass.
The real kicker? There are workarounds. Yet albeit such an effort! Now that eSIM is in charge, those good old days of single SIM card switching between iPhone and Light Phone are long gone. Need the iPhone for a while? No more quick switchbacks to the Light Phone’s ease. This digital leash kept me from plunging headlong into the Light life, so I could never really taste its promised freedom.
The better part of several weeks saw me on a digital absence of anything mobile, with my iPhone searched into the domestic realm. Oh, how deafening that silence was-if one could call that! All those notifications kept on ringing like an alarm and mouth-watering hoarding signs begging for my attention, being mutely reduced to zilch. That taste of freedom away from distractions by the big screen still lingers-a silent expression of rebellion against the very daily status quo of having my iPhone around. And even if I’m not quite ready yet for a full blow digital detox, I’ve heard that siren who sings that song. As they say, admitting you’re hooked is the first step to recovery.
Light Phone III review
Too basic for most people? Maybe so.
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