I’m making the move to ditch my thousand dollar iPhone XS Max in favor of a $250 thing called the Light Phone 2.
The move from a “smart” phone to a “tool” phone is driven by a couple of factors:
One — I’m not happy with how intrusive and all-consuming my phone has become. It seems like every few minutes there’s some alert, message, update, or text that requires my immediate attention. And even though I want to just deal with the interruption and then get back to what I was doing, I find that once I pick up the phone I wind up fiddling with it instead.
Two — the level of data collection from folks like Apple and Google has started to cause an arched eyebrow, with “Contact Tracing” being the newest incarnation of them getting to know you better than you know yourself.
And again, if a service is free you are the product — and I’m tired of being data-cattle for big-tech.
The biggest difference with the Light Phone 2 is that it is, quite simply, a phone — you make phone calls with it. It also does SMS and a few other handy things, but every function it offers is designed to be procedurally similar to a screwdriver; one does not pick up a screwdriver when it beeps and then play with for a half an hour.
The Light Phone 2 also does not have a camera. This has prompted me to clean and tune my old Canon G12 camera in preparation… I’d forgotten just how good the G12 is, and it’ll be nice to get back to some real photography.