Light Phone III review: Minimalism stretched to the point of frustration

Engadget

09-05-2025

Like untold millions of smartphone users, I have a bit of a problem. I've been trying, with middling success, to be more mindful about how I use my phone. I'll often uninstall various social media apps (but reinstall them later), and I've disconnected all my work tools unless I'm traveling specifically for the job. I don't play games without intention or doomscroll very much. But I still find myself mindlessly reaching for it when there's a moment to fill, and I don't love that habit. I don't think I'm completely addicted to my iPhone; my Screen Time stats put daily usage around two to three hours. That's less than I've seen a lot of people post on social media, but it's still significant.
I've been intrigued by the Light Phone III since I first saw some previews for it last year. As the name suggests, it's the third phone by Brooklyn-based startup Light, and the ethos remains the same. It has no "infinite scroll' apps like email, social media, a web browser or most everything else that defines a modern smartphone. It's designed for quick interactions so you can pick it up, respond to a call or message, maybe get directions or put on a song and then get back to life. However, there are a lot of improvements compared to prior Light Phones that made it feel a lot more viable to me. Specifically, there's a camera, the screen is OLED instead of E Ink and the wider, more responsive display is better suited to text input. It also looks cool in a minimalist way, and has some nicely responsive physical buttons in a world when those are becoming increasingly rare.
I've been using the $599 Light Phone III since late March, and my plan was to fully commit to it — but the practicality of doing so was surprisingly difficult. Based on my experience, it's going to be a tough sell for a lot of people who use a smartphone for basics or things only specific apps can deliver. The Light Phone III isn't quite ready to be most people's only device, but I wish it could be.
The Light Phone III is a well-designed device that can help you break your smartphone addiction, but it makes some major compromises. $599 at Light
In general, the Light Phone III reminds me a little bit of the very first iPhone — a device with maybe 16 built-in apps and nothing else. Of course, the iPhone had time-wasters like YouTube, an email client and a web browser, but that device was not nearly the attention-hog that modern smartphones are. In the same way, Light picked specific tools that it feels most people will need while keeping everything as simple and bare-bones as possible. The idea is that instead of a device filled with apps constantly notifying you and trying to grab your attention, the Light Phone is focused on intentional use so you aren't constantly picking up your phone.
That shows up in a variety of ways, from the basic block form factor to the fact that LightOS (based on Android, but you'd never know it) is literally white text on a black background. The only time you see color is if you open the camera or look at photos. But the most important thing is the extremely basic set of tools you can install on the device. Here's a full list in addition to the settings and phone / text messages apps: Alarm
Album
Calculator
Calendar
Camera
Directions
Directory
Hotspot
Music
Notes
Podcasts
Timer
If you want, you can literally just have the phone app, which also includes your contacts list and text messages. In 2025, that's wildly sparse. And you can see by the above list that none of these are things you're going to lose lots of time using. The austere approach doesn't just apply to the limited set of tools, either — it shows up in how each one is designed. For example, the Alarm tool doesn't have a snooze button. If you're using it as a wake up call, you had better get up when it goes off. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Before digging into what using this odd little device is like, let's run through its minimalist hardware. The Light Phone III is a chunky rectangle of a phone that's significantly shorter and thicker than what I'm used to. It's 12mm thick, compared to 7.8mm for the iPhone 16e or about 10mm for the Pixel 9a. But while the Light Phone III is about the same width as a modern iPhone, it's only 106mm tall, which is shorter than, say, the iPhone 16e (147mm). That makes the phone look a lot larger in images than it is in reality, because we're used to assuming a phone includes a 6-ish inch display. That's not the case here.
The front is dominated by the screen, but I haven't used a phone with a display this small in years. It's a 3.92-inch AMOLED panel with matte glass and 1,080 x 1,240 resolution, and the rest of the front is filled out by two large bezels. The top one houses an earpiece and selfie camera, while the bottom has a surprisingly solid-sounding speaker. On the back, you'll find the modest 5-megapixel camera with a flash; the bottom 60 percent is where the user-replaceable battery lives.
Another thing that makes the Light Phone stand out is its plethora of buttons, which is a rarity in the modern era. There's a power button with a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner, but unfortunately that sensor hasn't yet been activated in LightOS. The right side has a home button, with circular volume up and down keys surrounding it. Near the bottom right edge is a two-stage camera button, which is a rather surprising inclusion. Pressing it opens the camera app no matter what you're doing, and you can push it halfway down to activate the center focus point before depressing it all the way to take your picture. Finally, on the upper left corner is a button that turns on the flashlight; it's surrounded by a dial you can turn to adjust screen brightness. I have never felt like I needed my phone's flashlight enough for it to have a dedicated button, and of all the buttons this is the one I accidentally activated the most. But, the dial for screen brightness is pretty handy.
The Light Phone is powered by Qualcomm's SM 4450 processor with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. It also supports 5G networks in addition to LTE, and the phone is rounded out with the usual array of sensors: GPS, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC. And, of course, there's a USB-C port at the bottom for charging and limited connectivity with a computer.
Since the Light Phone's battery is removable, it's not nearly as large as the ones you'll find in most modern smartphones. You'll naturally be doing a lot less with this phone, though, so it's not a huge problem. I easily got multiple days of use from the Light Phone unless I was using navigation a lot. That drained the battery pretty quickly, so if you intend on using it for your GPS on a longer car trip, make sure you have a charging port for it while you drive. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Setting up a Light Phone III involves going to an online dashboard where you'll activate your phone. Once that's done, this is also where you can configure various tools and do things like add music and podcasts. There are minimal settings to fiddle with on the phone itself — you can adjust volume for various notifications like the phone ringer, alarms or media, or turn the hotspot on or off. There are the usual options for managing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections or updating the software, but it's a far slimmer menu than you'll find on an iPhone or Android device.
From the dashboard, I added all of the Light Phone's available tools and dug into the process of moving contacts and music over. I was hoping that the phone would just show up as a USB device when I plugged it into my computer so I could drag some MP3s over, but, alas, that's not the case. Managing content on the Light Phone requires using the dashboard; it shows every tool you have installed and clicking on them lets you upload songs or import contacts.
This was where I hit my first major friction point. I love music and am a bit obsessive over it, so being able to play songs on the go is absolutely crucial to me. I still buy music on Bandcamp sometimes and also have a big library of MP3s from the pre-streaming days, so I had plenty of tunes to add to my Light Phone. Sure, it wouldn't be the same as having access to the millions of songs on Apple Music or Spotify, but I was okay with a bit of a philosophical switch. After all, how many songs do you really need at a time?
Turns out the big issue isn't having fewer songs — it's how minimal both the music player and song uploader are. On the dashboard, you can add songs from your computer, but they all get dumped in one giant playlist. You can re-order things there, but that's the only semblance of organization. I had hoped that the Light Phone's music player would have an iPod sort of interface so you could use tags to dig into artists and albums, but no such luck. You can search for a song, and if you tap it to play it'll play everything following — that was the only way I could approximate the experience of listening to an album. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Making things even more challenging is the fact that songs aren't necessarily uploaded to the phone in any semblance of order. So even if your files are properly named, that ordering isn't always reflected in the final upload. I resorted to adding an album and then using the web dashboard interface to make sure the songs were in the proper order. That's worse than the experience I had using an iPod in 2003. To have to do this in 2025 is wild .
To be fair, the Light Phone creators told me that this software is a holdover from the Light Phone II, which could only hold 1GB of music, like an old iPod Shuffle. It wasn't really meant for browsing a large library, but instead was just meant to give you a quick selection of tunes in a pinch. And the company is actively working on a new player with artist/album sorting, custom playlists and letting you load files via USB-C. That would go a long way towards making it more useful. The good news is that sound quality was great and I could pair my AirPods Pro with zero issues.
Another worry I had was how the Light Phone's mapping and navigation tools would hold up. I am perpetually lost and also recently moved, so I often rely on turn-by-turn to figure out where I'm going. While the Directions tool is quite basic, it's enough to get the job done. Opening it up simply shows two fields to enter where you are and where you're going (it can also pull your current location via GPS). There's also a selector for whether you're driving, walking or using public transportation. While the latter two options basically just return a list of directions, driving gives you a proper map view and navigation alerts. When I used it while driving around, the map view was mostly clear and the directions were accurate enough to get me to my destination. It's all powered by Here location services, which have been around for ages and seem pretty good in my corner of the US.
Light pairs the Directions tool with a Directory that is its one concession to the search-powered world we live in. You can search for general terms (coffee) or specifics (Starbucks) and get a spread of results. Tapping on them shows some basic info like the address, hours, phone number and a basic description, and you can tap the map icon to send that place into the Directions app. It all works better than I expected for getting around, though both Google and Apple Maps are better at giving you real-time updates on public transit. I rely on real-time data for city buses, which makes the simple transit options on the Light Phone a bit hard to adjust to. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
This ethos unsurprisingly permeates every tool on the phone. As I mentioned earlier, the Alarm has no snooze button, but you can set multiple alarms. You can sync your Google calendar to the phone. But if you have a few calendars in your account (work, family, etc.), you can only see the default one. There's a basic Notes app, but you can't do things like attach photos to entries. I can't say I have a problem with any of this, because that's the whole point of the Light Phone — you know limitations are part of the equation going in.
There are two crucial features I haven't gotten to yet: the camera and the phone. This is the first Light Phone with a camera; there's a 50-megapixel one on the back (images are binned and output at 12 megapixels) and an 8-megapixel one on the front for selfies. The company's blog shows off a bunch of samples and talks about the process they've used to tune the camera's output. Suffice it to say that these images are wildly different from the heavily processed results you'll get from most modern smartphones. In good light, the Light Phone's photos look decent enough but clearly lack the fine detail we're used to these days. It's the kind of camera that you can use in a pinch, but you'll find it lacking if you're at all serious about photography.
For me the issue is less about the image quality, which has its own lo-fi charm, and more about the camera's responsiveness. Light included a dedicated camera button, making it exceedingly simple to quickly shoot an image. But, once you have your scene framed up and press the shutter button, it takes between one and three seconds for the camera to actually take the photo. That's an eternity and it makes the camera impossible to use for anything where movement is involved. I'm glad the Light Phone III has a camera. But it brings me back to a time when phone cameras were useful but filled with compromises. I could live with the aesthetics of the images if the camera was more responsive, but the lag just kills it. If I used the Light Phone full time, I'd probably use my proper camera way more often — which might be a good thing! But I'd definitely miss the convenience of taking quality photos in a pinch from my phone. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
Some 15 or 20 years ago, cell phones were mostly meant for talking and texting, remember? The Light Phone III is a great device for phone calls, and a mediocre one for texting. In my testing, calls were clear and easy to hear on both ends, and the built-in speaker is surprisingly usable when you don't feel like holding something up (please, stop using speaker phone so much in public, people!). The contacts section of the app is, of course, minimal: just names and phone numbers. As such, this cannot replace an address book or modern contact list. For most people I care about, I need to store at least a phone number, address and email. There's of course no need for an email address on the Light Phone, but an address field would be great so you can quickly pull up directions to a friend's house.
If the Light Phone's music player was a letdown, trying to text was the fatal flaw that killed my dream of using this device full time. Compared to the Light Phone II, this new model is significantly easier to text with. The more responsive and wider OLED screen means the keyboard is similar in size to the ones you'll find on an iPhone or Android device. The messaging app also does some smart things, like automatically sending links and photos people share to your email address so you can engage with them on your computer.
But there's no autocorrect. And if you haven't tried to text on a phone without autocorrect lately, let me tell you — it sucks. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
The internet is full of people complaining about bizarre autocorrect mistakes, but what goes unnoticed is how it hangs out in the background actually makes the majority of our messages far clearer. If I try to text at a speed similar to that on my iPhone, my messages are riddled with typos. Even when I slow down it's still very easy to misfire, necessitating frustrating edits to fix things. There's a spell-check feature built in, so words that I biffed were at least underlined. A long press on them gave me a few options to correct things, but the time it took me to compose and send messages was significantly longer than on a modern device. The keyboard layout itself is fine and took little time to adjust to, but I never felt comfortable because I was always making and fixing mistakes.
The other half of this issue is more philosophical. Back in the day, we used texts to send quick updates to people; having lengthy conversations was not the norm. That changed even before the advent of smartphones and I have friends whose speed at texting using T9 was impressive. But still, phones just weren't meant for that. At this point, though, whether it's in WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal or your phone's built-in messaging system, we have ongoing conversations that go with us everywhere.
The Light Phone is a return towards using messaging for quick check-ins and updates, perhaps as precursors to an actual phone (or in-person!) conversation. But trust me when I say that keeping up with a group conversation will be an exercise in frustration with the Light Phone. I can live with the minimalist interface, limited emoji selection and inability to send anything besides plain text and photos if I could type faster — but I can't. You'll need to fundamentally re-think your relationship with how you use messaging on a phone.
Which is kind of the point of this whole exercise.
I can blame the music player or lack of autocorrect, but ultimately I was not ready for how radically different the Light Phone III experience is. There were a host of practical considerations that kept me from fully buying in. I need two-factor authentication apps for a lot of services I use. If I wanted to go to a concert, I'd need a smartphone for tickets. I don't deal with checks often, but I can't remember the last time I deposited one at a bank instead of on my phone. I'm going on vacation soon and want to be able to take good photos without dragging my camera around.
I could figure out the necessary work-arounds for almost all of these things. Maybe the updated music player Light is working on would be enough for me when it comes out. I'd probably get used to the keyboard eventually, to some degree. I could use my 'real' camera more, probably leading to better and more thoughtful photos. I could get a work phone through our parent company to use for authentication.
The point is that while there are ways around these things, implementing them involves a ton of work. And unfortunately, now that eSIM has taken over, it's not as simple as just popping a SIM card into my iPhone if I needed it for some of these things and then dropping it back in the Light Phone for day-to-day life. And because I wasn't able to fully give myself over to the Light lifestyle, I didn't really get to experience its benefits in a major way.
But, for a few weeks, I left my iPhone at home when I left the house as much as possible and there was something freeing about the complete lack of notifications and general siren-call for attention that I usually deal with. It's something that has stuck with me even as I shifted back to my iPhone for daily use. I might not be ready to fully break my addiction to my smartphone, but as they say, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Too basic for most people? Maybe so.