Minimalism stretched to the point of frustration Leave a comment

Like untold thousands and thousands of smartphone customers, I’ve a little bit of an issue. I’ve been making an attempt, with middling success, to be extra conscious about how I take advantage of my telephone. I’ll usually uninstall varied social media apps (however reinstall them later), and I’ve disconnected all my work instruments except I’m touring particularly for the job. I don’t play video games with out intention or doomscroll very a lot. However I nonetheless discover myself mindlessly reaching for it when there’s a second to fill, and I don’t love that behavior. I don’t assume I’m fully hooked on my iPhone; my Display screen Time stats put day by day utilization round two to 3 hours. That’s lower than I’ve seen lots of people put up on social media, nevertheless it’s nonetheless important.

I’ve been intrigued by the Light Phone III since I first noticed some previews for it final 12 months. Because the identify suggests, it’s the third telephone by Brooklyn-based startup Gentle, and the ethos stays the identical. It has no “infinite scroll” apps like e-mail, social media, an internet browser or most all the pieces else that defines a contemporary smartphone. It’s designed for fast interactions so you possibly can choose it up, reply to a name or message, perhaps get instructions or placed on a track after which get again to life. Nevertheless, there are numerous enhancements in comparison with prior Gentle Telephones that made it really feel much more viable to me. Particularly, there’s a digital camera, the display screen is OLED as an alternative of E Ink and the broader, extra responsive show is healthier suited to textual content enter. It additionally seems to be cool in a minimalist method, and has some properly responsive bodily buttons in a world when these have gotten more and more uncommon.

I’ve been utilizing the $599 Gentle Telephone III since late March, and my plan was to totally decide to it — however the practicality of doing so was surprisingly tough. Based mostly on my expertise, it’s going to be a troublesome promote for lots of people who use a smartphone for fundamentals or issues solely particular apps can ship. The Gentle Telephone III isn’t fairly able to be most individuals’s solely machine, however I want it may very well be.

The Gentle philosophy

On the whole, the Gentle Telephone III jogs my memory a bit little bit of the very first iPhone — a tool with perhaps 16 built-in apps and nothing else. In fact, the iPhone had time-wasters like YouTube, an e-mail consumer and an internet browser, however that machine was not almost the attention-hog that fashionable smartphones are. In the identical method, Gentle picked particular instruments that it feels most individuals will want whereas preserving all the pieces as easy and bare-bones as potential. The concept is that as an alternative of a tool stuffed with apps always notifying you and making an attempt to seize your consideration, the Gentle Telephone is concentrated on intentional use so that you aren’t always selecting up your telephone.

That exhibits up in a wide range of methods, from the essential block type issue to the truth that LightOS (based mostly on Android, however you’d by no means understand it) is actually white textual content on a black background. The one time you see shade is for those who open the digital camera or take a look at images. However an important factor is the extraordinarily fundamental set of instruments you possibly can set up on the machine. Right here’s a full record along with the settings and telephone / textual content messages apps:

• Alarm

• Album

• Calculator

• Calendar

• Digital camera

• Instructions

• Listing

• Hotspot

• Music

• Notes

• Podcasts

• Timer

In order for you, you possibly can actually simply have the telephone app, which additionally consists of your contacts record and textual content messages. In 2025, that’s wildly sparse. And you may see by the above record that none of those are belongings you’re going to lose a number of time utilizing. The austere method doesn’t simply apply to the restricted set of instruments, both — it exhibits up in how each is designed. For instance, the Alarm instrument doesn’t have a sleep button. In the event you’re utilizing it as a get up name, you had higher rise up when it goes off.

{Hardware}

Earlier than digging into what utilizing this odd little machine is like, let’s run via its minimalist {hardware}. The Gentle Telephone III is a chunky rectangle of a telephone that’s considerably shorter and thicker than what I’m used to. It’s 12mm thick, in comparison with 7.8mm for the iPhone 16e or about 10mm for the Pixel 9a. However whereas the Gentle Telephone III is about the identical width as a contemporary iPhone, it’s solely 106mm tall, which is shorter than, say, the iPhone 16e (147mm). That makes the telephone look rather a lot bigger in pictures than it’s in actuality, as a result of we’re used to assuming a telephone features a 6-ish inch show. That’s not the case right here.

The entrance is dominated by the display screen, however I haven’t used a telephone with a show this small in years. It’s a 3.92-inch AMOLED panel with matte glass and 1,080 x 1,240 decision, and the remainder of the entrance is crammed out by two massive bezels. The highest one homes an earpiece and selfie digital camera, whereas the underside has a surprisingly solid-sounding speaker. On the again, you’ll discover the modest 5-megapixel digital camera with a flash; the underside 60 p.c is the place the user-replaceable battery lives.

One other factor that makes the Gentle Telephone stand out is its plethora of buttons, which is a rarity within the fashionable period. There’s an influence button with a fingerprint sensor on the highest proper nook, however sadly that sensor hasn’t but been activated in LightOS. The best facet has a house button, with round quantity up and down keys surrounding it. Close to the underside proper edge is a two-stage digital camera button, which is a fairly shocking inclusion. Urgent it opens the digital camera app it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, and you’ll push it midway right down to activate the middle focus level earlier than miserable all of it the way in which to take your image. Lastly, on the higher left nook is a button that activates the flashlight; it’s surrounded by a dial you possibly can flip to regulate display screen brightness. I’ve by no means felt like I wanted my telephone’s flashlight sufficient for it to have a devoted button, and of all of the buttons that is the one I by chance activated probably the most. However, the dial for display screen brightness is fairly helpful.

The Gentle Telephone is powered by Qualcomm’s SM 4450 processor with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of inside storage. It additionally helps 5G networks along with LTE, and the telephone is rounded out with the standard array of sensors: GPS, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC. And, in fact, there’s a USB-C port on the backside for charging and restricted connectivity with a pc.

Because the Gentle Telephone’s battery is detachable, it’s not almost as massive as those you’ll discover in most fashionable smartphones. You’ll naturally be doing rather a lot much less with this telephone, although, so it’s not an enormous drawback. I simply acquired a number of days of use from the Gentle Telephone except I used to be utilizing navigation rather a lot. That drained the battery fairly rapidly, so for those who intend on utilizing it to your GPS on an extended automobile journey, ensure you have a charging port for it whilst you drive.

Going Gentle

Organising a Gentle Telephone III includes going to a web-based dashboard the place you’ll activate your telephone. As soon as that’s accomplished, that is additionally the place you possibly can configure varied instruments and do issues like add music and podcasts. There are minimal settings to fiddle with on the telephone itself — you possibly can regulate quantity for varied notifications just like the telephone ringer, alarms or media, or flip the hotspot on or off. There are the standard choices for managing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections or updating the software program, nevertheless it’s a far slimmer menu than you’ll discover on an iPhone or Android machine.

From the dashboard, I added all the Gentle Telephone’s obtainable instruments and dug into the method of shifting contacts and music over. I hoped that the telephone would simply present up as a USB machine once I plugged it into my laptop so I may drag some MP3s over, however, alas, that’s not the case. Managing content material on the Gentle Telephone requires utilizing the dashboard; it exhibits each instrument you could have put in and clicking on them permits you to add songs or import contacts.

This was the place I hit my first main friction level. I like music and am a bit obsessive over it, so with the ability to play songs on the go is completely essential to me. I nonetheless purchase music on Bandcamp typically and now have an enormous library of MP3s from the pre-streaming days, so I had loads of tunes so as to add to my Gentle Telephone. Positive, it wouldn’t be the identical as getting access to the thousands and thousands of songs on Apple Music or Spotify, however I used to be okay with a little bit of a philosophical change. In spite of everything, what number of songs do you actually need at a time?

Seems the large difficulty isn’t having fewer songs — it’s how minimal each the music participant and track uploader are. On the dashboard, you possibly can add songs out of your laptop, however all of them get dumped in a single big playlist. You possibly can re-order issues there, however that’s the one semblance of group. I had hoped that the Gentle Telephone’s music participant would have an iPod kind of interface so you may use tags to dig into artists and albums, however no such luck. You possibly can seek for a track, and for those who faucet it to play it’ll play all the pieces following — that was the one method I may approximate the expertise of listening to an album.

Making issues much more difficult is the truth that songs aren’t essentially uploaded to the telephone in any semblance of order. So even when your recordsdata are correctly named, that ordering isn’t all the time mirrored within the remaining add. I resorted to including an album after which utilizing the net dashboard interface to ensure the songs had been within the correct order. That’s worse than the expertise I had utilizing an iPod in 2003. To have to do that in 2025 is wild.

To be honest, the Gentle Telephone creators advised me that this software program is a holdover from the Gentle Telephone II, which may solely maintain 1GB of music, like an outdated iPod Shuffle. It wasn’t actually meant for shopping a big library, however as an alternative was simply meant to provide you a fast choice of tunes in a pinch. And the corporate is actively engaged on a brand new participant with artist/album sorting, customized playlists and letting you load recordsdata through USB-C. That might go a good distance in the direction of making it extra helpful. The excellent news is that sound high quality was nice and I may pair my AirPods Professional with zero points.

One other fear I had was how the Gentle Telephone’s mapping and navigation instruments would maintain up. I’m perpetually misplaced and likewise not too long ago moved, so I usually depend on turn-by-turn to determine the place I’m going. Whereas the Instructions instrument is kind of fundamental, it’s sufficient to get the job accomplished. Opening it up merely exhibits two fields to enter the place you’re and the place you’re going (it may possibly additionally pull your present location through GPS). There’s additionally a selector for whether or not you’re driving, strolling or utilizing public transportation. Whereas the latter two choices principally simply return an inventory of instructions, driving offers you a correct map view and navigation alerts. After I used it whereas driving round, the map view was largely clear and the instructions had been correct sufficient to get me to my vacation spot. It’s all powered by Right here location providers, which have been round for ages and appear fairly good in my nook of the US.

Gentle pairs the Instructions instrument with a Listing that’s its one concession to the search-powered world we stay in. You possibly can seek for basic phrases (espresso) or specifics (Starbucks) and get a diffusion of outcomes. Tapping on them exhibits some fundamental information just like the handle, hours, telephone quantity and a fundamental description, and you’ll faucet the map icon to ship that place into the Instructions app. All of it works higher than I anticipated for getting round, although each Google and Apple Maps are higher at supplying you with real-time updates on public transit. I depend on real-time knowledge for metropolis buses, which makes the easy transit choices on the Gentle Telephone a bit onerous to regulate to.

This ethos unsurprisingly permeates each instrument on the telephone. As I discussed earlier, the Alarm has no snooze button, however you possibly can set a number of alarms. You possibly can sync your Google calendar to the telephone. However in case you have a couple of calendars in your account (work, household, and so forth.), you possibly can solely see the default one. There’s a fundamental Notes app, however you possibly can’t do issues like connect images to entries. I can’t say I’ve an issue with any of this, as a result of that’s the entire level of the Gentle Telephone — you understand limitations are a part of the equation entering into.

There are two essential options I haven’t gotten to but: the digital camera and the telephone. That is the primary Gentle Telephone with a digital camera; there’s a 50-megapixel one on the again (pictures are binned and output at 12 megapixels) and an 8-megapixel one on the entrance for selfies. The company’s blog exhibits off a bunch of samples and talks concerning the course of they’ve used to tune the digital camera’s output. Suffice it to say that these pictures are wildly totally different from the closely processed outcomes you’ll get from most fashionable smartphones. In good gentle, the Gentle Telephone’s images look respectable sufficient however clearly lack the tremendous element we’re used to nowadays. It’s the type of digital camera that you should use in a pinch, however you’ll discover it missing for those who’re in any respect critical about pictures.

For me the difficulty is much less concerning the picture high quality, which has its personal lo-fi appeal, and extra concerning the digital camera’s responsiveness. Gentle included a devoted digital camera button, making it exceedingly easy to rapidly shoot a picture. However, upon getting your scene framed up and press the shutter button, it takes between one and three seconds for the digital camera to really take the photograph. That’s an eternity and it makes the digital camera inconceivable to make use of for something the place motion is concerned. I’m glad the Gentle Telephone III has a digital camera. However it brings me again to a time when telephone cameras had been helpful however stuffed with compromises. I may stay with the aesthetics of the photographs if the digital camera was extra responsive, however the lag simply kills it. If I used the Gentle Telephone full time, I’d in all probability use my correct digital camera far more usually — which could be an excellent factor! However I’d positively miss the comfort of taking high quality images in a pinch from my telephone.

Utilizing the Gentle Telephone as a telephone

Some 15 or 20 years in the past, cell telephones had been largely meant for speaking and texting, bear in mind? The Gentle Telephone III is a superb machine for telephone calls, and a mediocre one for texting. In my testing, calls had been clear and straightforward to listen to on each ends, and the built-in speaker is surprisingly usable once you don’t really feel like holding one thing up (please, cease utilizing speaker telephone a lot in public, folks!). The contacts part of the app is, in fact, minimal: simply names and telephone numbers. As such, this can’t change an handle e book or fashionable contact record. For most individuals I care about, I have to retailer a minimum of a telephone quantity, handle and e-mail. There’s in fact no want for an e-mail handle on the Gentle Telephone, however an handle area could be nice so you possibly can rapidly pull up instructions to a buddy’s home.

If the Gentle Telephone’s music participant was a letdown, making an attempt to textual content was the deadly flaw that killed my dream of utilizing this machine full time. In comparison with the Gentle Telephone II, this new mannequin is considerably simpler to textual content with. The extra responsive and wider OLED display screen means the keyboard is comparable in dimension to those you’ll discover on an iPhone or Android machine. The messaging app additionally does some sensible issues, like mechanically sending hyperlinks and images folks share to your e-mail handle so you possibly can have interaction with them in your laptop.

However there’s no autocorrect. And for those who haven’t tried to textual content on a telephone with out autocorrect these days, let me let you know — it sucks.

The web is stuffed with folks complaining about weird autocorrect errors, however what goes unnoticed is the way it hangs out within the background truly makes the vast majority of our messages far clearer. If I attempt to textual content at a velocity much like that on my iPhone, my messages are riddled with typos. Even once I decelerate it’s nonetheless very straightforward to misfire, necessitating irritating edits to make things better. There’s a spell-check characteristic in-built, so phrases that I biffed had been a minimum of underlined. An extended press on them gave me a couple of choices to right issues, however the time it took me to compose and ship messages was considerably longer than on a contemporary machine. The keyboard structure itself is okay and took little time to regulate to, however I by no means felt snug as a result of I used to be all the time making and fixing errors.

The opposite half of this difficulty is extra philosophical. Again within the day, we used texts to ship fast updates to folks; having prolonged conversations was not the norm. That modified even earlier than the appearance of smartphones and I’ve buddies whose velocity at texting utilizing T9 was spectacular. However nonetheless, telephones simply weren’t meant for that. At this level, although, whether or not it is in WhatsApp or Telegram or Sign or your telephone’s built-in messaging system, we’ve ongoing conversations that go together with us in all places.

The Gentle Telephone is a return in the direction of utilizing messaging for fast check-ins and updates, maybe as precursors to an precise telephone (or in-person!) dialog. However belief me once I say that maintaining with a bunch dialog can be an train in frustration with the Gentle Telephone. I can stay with the minimalist interface, restricted emoji choice and incapability to ship something apart from plain textual content and images if I may kind quicker — however I can’t. You’ll have to basically re-think your relationship with how you employ messaging on a telephone.

Which is type of the purpose of this complete train.

Breaking an habit

I can blame the music participant or lack of autocorrect, however finally I used to be not prepared for the way radically totally different the Gentle Telephone III expertise is. There have been a bunch of sensible issues that stored me from totally shopping for in. I want two-factor authentication apps for lots of providers I take advantage of. If I wished to go to a live performance, I’d want a smartphone for tickets. I don’t take care of checks usually, however I can’t bear in mind the final time I deposited one at a financial institution as an alternative of on my telephone. I’m occurring trip quickly and wish to have the ability to take good images with out dragging my digital camera round.

I may determine the required work-arounds for nearly all of this stuff. Perhaps the up to date music participant Gentle is engaged on could be sufficient for me when it comes out. I’d in all probability get used to the keyboard ultimately, to a point. I may use my “actual” digital camera extra, in all probability main to higher and extra considerate images. I may get a piece telephone via our guardian firm to make use of for authentication.

The purpose is that whereas there are methods round this stuff, implementing them includes a ton of labor. And sadly, now that eSIM has taken over, it’s not so simple as simply popping a SIM card into my iPhone if I wanted it for a few of these issues after which dropping it again within the Gentle Telephone for day-to-day life. And since I wasn’t in a position to totally give myself over to the Gentle way of life, I didn’t actually get to expertise its advantages in a serious method.

However, for a couple of weeks, I left my iPhone at residence once I left the home as a lot as potential and there was one thing liberating concerning the full lack of notifications and basic siren-call for consideration that I normally take care of. It’s one thing that has caught with me at the same time as I shifted again to my iPhone for day by day use. I may not be prepared to totally break my habit to my smartphone, however as they are saying, step one is admitting you could have an issue.