Joe Hollier, a 25-year-old former skater turned technology entrepreneur, gave up his smartphone. He went “light”, leaving behind his high tech pocket companion and disconnecting from a world defined by ready access to the internet.
It was not easy, he admits. “There
is an initial anxiety,” he says. “It’s quite intense. You start tapping your
pocket, but then there is this feeling of huge relief.”
New York-based Mr Hollier and his
co-founder Kaiwei Tang used the experience as the basis for a subversive mobile
phone that will be launched soon: revolutionary not for all the advanced
features but for the lack of any at all.
The Light Phone allows you to make
or take calls, but nothing else. There is only enough storage in the phone for
10 numbers. No messaging, no camera, no internet.
The design is important: it is
simplicity itself in a plastic shell the size of a credit card on which the
numbers glow using a dot matrix screen and with a 20-day battery life.
Mr Hollier met Mr Tang at a Google-run tech incubator.
“We found that the value is not in what it can do but in the lack of it. We are
offering the maximum disconnection with the minimum of choice.”
In a market where even the cheapest
smartphones have the processing power of a basic personal computer, the Light
Phone is partly a protest against the digital age. But Mr Hollier hopes it can
become more than that: a way for its users to cut out distractions.
Mr Tang and Mr Hollier raised
$415,127 from 3,187 backers on the Kickstarter platform to develop the phone.
The device is still at a prototype stage but a company in China has begun
manufacturing handsets to be shipped in June. They have taken pre-orders for
$100 but say the exact retail price is not yet fixed. The first Light Phone is
white; a black version is planned for later.
The device has found unexpected
fans. Mr Hollier, who has had an array of jobs from running his own
skateboarding company to film-making and graphic design, assumed that people a
bit like him would want the phone: younger users who might want not want to
take expensive tech to the beach or to go skating.
But the device has found special
resonance with business users over 45 years old, he says, who enjoyed the days
before the constant distractions of the smartphone.
He says there has been a
surprisingly warm reception in Asia, perhaps a backlash against the popularity
of bigger “phablet” phones designed primarily for access to the internet and
watching video.
Mr Hollier admits that most people
will also want a smartphone, which can be linked to the Light Phone to forward
calls.
In trying to create a device
purposely designed to be used as little as possible, Mr Hollier and his partner
may have stumbled on something that could turn out to be used a lot.
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