Light Phone III review: everything in moderation – The Verge

What are the essential features of a smartphone? That’s not a rhetorical question, and it’s actually a useful exercise: if I were to take away everything but the things you truly need on your phone, what would those things be? And how might you interact with your phone differently if those things were all you had?

The $599 Light Phone III is one attempt to answer those questions. The Light Phone III is substantially more powerful, functional, and smartphone-ish than anything Light has shipped before. (It’s also substantially more expensive.) It has a camera now, and a fast and colorful touchscreen. It connects to 5G networks on all three major US carriers and lots of others around the world.

It’s a smarter phone than the previous Light Phones, but it’s still not a smartphone. It has no app store, no social media, no web browser, none of the things we do on our phones all day. That is, of course, the whole point: Light envisions the device as either a no-frills, nights-and-weekends complement to your smartphone or a wholesale replacement for anyone looking for much less screen time. More recently, it has caught on as a device for kids — a school in Massachusetts made news a few years ago by banning smartphones and giving students Light Phones instead.

The Light Phone III comes tantalizingly close to being my ideal minimalist phone without getting quite there. Part of the problem is that the phone’s not quite finished: its NFC sensor, front-facing camera, and fingerprint reader aren’t yet active, all of which would add some useful new possibilities to the device. Light is working on integrations that will go a long way toward fully satisfying my own list of essential phone things, too. And there are a few interface and usability things that make it hard to live the Light life.

The Light Phone II got substantially better in the years it was on sale, and the Light team says this one will, too. It won’t ever be the right device for everyone, but I am awfully charmed by it.

Light Phones have always been nicely designed, but the newest model is my favorite yet. The all-black-everything design makes the Phone III feel a little like something a spy might carry, and the sharp-edged boxiness kind of makes it feel like a weapon. (It weighs 124 grams and is 12mm thick — basically, imagine you put a case on an iPhone 16, chop the whole thing in two right above the volume buttons, and the bottom bit is a Light Phone. That might not be helpful.) I really like the way the Phone III looks, though the top edge does dig into my ear a little when I’m on long calls.

Instead of a small, slow-refreshing E Ink screen that sticks out against big bezels, this one has a 3.92-inch, 1080 x 1240 AMOLED panel that blends really nicely into the device’s… still pretty big bezels. This is probably the biggest hardware upgrade on the phone: Light CEO Kaiwei Tang tells me the slow and blocky E Ink screen was previously the number one reason people bailed on their Light Phone. The AMOLED is much more responsive to scrolling and swiping and, in particular, is much more pleasant to type on.

The tradeoff, of course, is that the screen is a little harder on a battery and a lot brighter to look at — but Light designs around both of those problems pretty well. The phone’s interface is still nearly all black and white: it’s almost jarring when you open up the camera and everything’s suddenly in full color, because Light works so hard to keep things monochrome and unenticing everywhere else.

There are no impressive specs to be found on the Phone III. It has a Qualcomm SM 4450 chip, 128GB of storage, and 6GB of RAM. The (replaceable!) 1,800mAh battery is small but still enough to keep this thing running for two or three days at a clip in my testing. Remember: this phone is explicitly designed not to be powerful. It can’t do much, and it’s not supposed to.

Here is a complete list of everything the Light Phone III can do, ordered by how I set up my phone. Light calls them “Tools,” but they’re essentially just apps. A couple of them come built in, and you add the rest by accessing a web dashboard from some other device. (If you get a Light Phone, be prepared to spend a lot of time in that dashboard, because you can’t do much tinkering on the phone itself.) Anyway, here’s the list:

That’s the longest the list has ever been for a Light Phone, and it does most of its jobs really well. But I suspect most people will think it’s missing at least one thing. For me, the biggest one is Spotify, which Tang, Light’s CEO, tells me the company is working on. I’d also really like some kind of basic reading app and some more messaging options — going with a Light Phone means ditching WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and everything else that isn’t SMS. (RCS: also apparently coming soon.) For most people, that alone is either annoying or deal-breaking.

While I’m making a list of stuff that’s missing, here are a few more. The Light Phone III connects easily and reliably to Bluetooth headphones, but I can’t use my headphones to control playback on the phone. I love the feel of the dedicated button and scroll wheel on the left side, so why don’t they do more than turn on the flashlight and dial screen brightness? (Tang says more options are coming.) I like that I can sync my Google Calendar to the phone; why can’t I do the same with contacts? And oh, here’s a weird one: I really, really, really miss CarPlay and Android Auto.

Still, I was surprised how quickly I adapted to most of life with the Light Phone. It took about a day to stop instinctively swiping up to get to a homescreen and instead hit the button on the side to switch Tools — or just turn the screen off. I spent 20 minutes subscribing to all my podcasts, and the Phone III became the thing I tote from room to room blaring The Rewatchables. I didn’t even try to switch away from iMessage and WhatsApp, to be honest — I just sent some SMSes and did the rest of my texting from my computer. All my reading, YouTube-ing, and mindless scrolling were shunted to another device, too. (In this case, mostly an iPad.)

My best advice for the Light Phone is to wait. The company has a terrific track record for maintaining and improving its devices, and I have every confidence that it will eventually turn on the NFC chip and add a digital wallet, simplify login and payment with the fingerprint reader, add video chat with the front-facing camera, and build the integrations — like Lyft and Spotify — it has promised. But The Verge’s long-standing policy is to review only what’s in the box, and for now, the phone is unfinished.

There’s one other thing preventing Light from really achieving its goals, and that’s wireless carriers. In a perfect world, you’d be able to switch between a smartphone and a Light Phone with a couple of taps — move the e-SIM over here, turn it on, done and done. In reality, unless you have a very specific and expensive plan, there’s simply no way to easily and repeatedly move your stuff and your service between devices. (That’s far less true in Europe and elsewhere, for what it’s worth.) I don’t want to ditch my iPhone entirely, but I’d love to be able to flip back and forth between devices, and it’s not really feasible to do so.

Still, there’s no other phone quite like the Light Phone III, and I suspect it will appeal to many people. The idea of the Light Phone is to turn “using your phone” into a thing you do on purpose, not absentmindedly whenever your brain is unoccupied for three seconds. Having instant, always-on access to everything is not a good thing, and the Light Phone takes it away. I have used the Light Phone III less than any other phone I’ve ever reviewed, and that is a great thing.

I’ve long believed in the idea behind the Light Phone, and I believe in this phone, too. I just wish it had WhatsApp.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge