Your smartphone is rotting your brain. At least, I know mine is. I've been covering smartphones for about 15 years, and my attention span is shot, fragmented into a thousand pieces each enslaved to the endless scroll. The $350 Light Phone II aims to rescue us and rebuild our minds, by giving us a small, convenient voice and text device that eases the anxiety of being unconnected but doesn't have Facebook or Twitter. And if that's what you're looking for, it works exactly as described.

The Light Phone Philosophy

"Don't you have self control?" you may ask. And yes, there are a bunch of ways to take Facebook and its ilk off your phone. My wife has disabled the browser on her phone, which has done her a world of good. But the Light Phone isn't just a device that doesn't do much—it's less immersive, smaller, and less colorful than smartphones (and most feature phones). It's in every way a device that doesn't grab you. That's the point.

This philosophical framing helps justify why this is a hip-looking $350 voice phone, of course. There are some big markets for voice phones that the Light Phone doesn't touch: I know a lot of people looking for inexpensive, simple, or rugged phones for kids or seniors, and this isn't it. (The only one I enthusiastically recommend right now is the $189 Sonim XP3 for Sprint and AT&T, which still isn't that inexpensive.) This is a secondary or weekend phone for someone trying to disconnect.

As such, it works on a variety of service plans. It's sold unlocked and works on plans with the AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon networks. Those can be lines on the main carriers, or smaller virtual carriers like Tello, Ting, or US Mobile. The company offers its own $30/month unlimited plan on AT&T's network but you find a better plan elsewhere.

The phone can also be set up with the carriers' "secondary phone" schemes, which let you use two phones with one phone number. That would let you have a primary smartphone, but take the Light Phone around when you don't want to use it. Those services (called NumberSync on AT&T, Digits on T-Mobile, and NumberShare on Verizon) work with any primary smartphone as long as it doesn't have iMessage enabled.

For more on the background of the Light Phone, including its earlier crowdfunding success, check out our earlier story.

A Divisive, Minimalist Design

The Light Phone II's design is edgy and, I think, divisive. It's all made of matte gray or white plastic, with a power button on the top, and menu and volume buttons on one side. And it's very stubby. There's a reason phones are generally as long as they are; they cradle your face for a secure feeling and better noise cancellation. The Light Phone II literally cuts that short. At only 3.77 inches high, it's going to fall well short of your mouth and feel like it might slip out of your hand. It isn't made of slippery material, it's just very small. The phone is splash resistant, but not dunkable.

The phone's size is part of its philosophical statement, but I think it could have been a more practical shape. Its body is just about the size of the palm of your hand. Drop it in a pocket, even a small one on tight pants, and it disappears. The issue is when you're using it in a traditional phone manner. Held up to your head, it feels a little insecure because it doesn't reach down to your mouth.

Call Quality

That affects voice quality, too. The Light Phone, unlike the Punkt MP02, gets an important thing right on the first try: Coverage. Using VoLTE with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon on bands 2/4/12/13/17/25/26, it gets solid nationwide and in-building coverage. It lacks T-Mobile's new band 71, which adds some rural coverage, but it has the basics. Although the phone has Wi-Fi, for a future hotspot mode, it doesn't support Wi-Fi calling.

VoLTE, or 4G calling, is important. All of the carriers are turning down, or off, their 2G and 3G networks. That means a lot of less expensive, older or imported voice phones, such as Nokia's voice phones, work worse over time in the US. Relatively few voice phones support US 4G calling, but it's what you need for the future.

You need a SIM that supports VoLTE, though. The phone shipped to us with a Ting SIM that makes calls over AT&T's 3G network, something the phone doesn't indicate. Test calls were messy, scratchy, distorted, and unpleasant all around, with little noise cancellation and audible artifacts. Switching it for a T-Mobile SIM with VoLTE, call quality immediately improved. There were fewer artifacts and voices were distinctly sharper, richer, and more audible. If you're comparing with an older 3G phone, VoLTE will be a big jump up. Still, there's not much noise cancellation. Transmissions easily picked up traffic noise or other conversations passing by.

The speakerphone is quiet; it isn't for outdoor use, although it's fine indoors or in your car (as long as you don't mind the person on the other end hearing car noises). Transmissions and sound quality improve significantly if you attach a good wired or Bluetooth headset. There's a standard 3.5mm headphone jack for a headset.

The thing is, other cheap voice phones also don't tend to have the finest sound quality. A lot of that is because the EVS codec that enables the best sound quality isn't typically found on the chipsets that go into cheap voice phones. The sound here is no worse than on the flip phones most carriers sell—it just isn't up to the standards of flagship smartphones, even older ones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 or OnePlus 6. In terms of flip phones, the Sonim XP3 for AT&T sounds better.

OS and "Apps"

The phone has a 2.8-inch front-lit E Ink screen that only ever shows text, not pictures. Turn it on, and there's a simple interface showing signal strength, battery level, and the time. Tap the bottom of the screen to go to the phone book; hit the side button to go to the main menu. It does exhibit some ghosting when you flip from screen to screen, if that bothers you.

Battery life is fine. I got 6 hours, 3 minutes of talk time, and about three days of standby. The phone charges pretty quickly over its (old-school) micro USB port—I got about 30 percent in half an hour, tracking out to 90 minutes to two hours for a charge.

Light Phone runs Light OS, which is designed to not let you do much. Pressing the big button on the side of the phone lets you make calls, set an alarm (just one), or go to settings.

The phone book takes an interesting approach. You can enter phone numbers on the phone itself or through a very simple online interface, where each entry just has three fields: first name, last name, and number. Using the online interface, you can enter contacts in a form, sync with iCloud, or import VCF files. Light should work on Google syncing: VCF files are arcane.

You dial with the slightly sluggish E Ink touch screen; there are no physical buttons or voice dialing here. Tapping a contact on the screen gives you an option to call, as well as the contact's text message history. There's no distinct texting app; you text from the phone book or dialer. There are 14 mellow ringtones and a weak vibrating motor. You can't set ringtones by contact, group contacts, or set whitelists, although you can blacklist specific contacts.

For texting, the phone supports simple SMS only. If you receive a message with a photo, it just shows a little picture icon. Emoji didn't show up on my phone, although there is a "show emoji" option in settings, so it's clearly intended for the future. When you go to type, you turn the phone sideways and type on a very small, landscape format E Ink keyboard, with no movable cursor so you can't go back and fix typos easily. There's a noticeable delay in typing each key, but that's OK—remember the philosophy of the phone, which is that you aren't supposed to be using it.

The company will push more apps in upcoming software updates, including a local music player, turn-by-turn text-based directions, a calculator, a Wi-Fi hotspot feature, and a find-my-phone feature. More hazily on the roadmap are an ability to hail cars (probably Lyft), to play existing Spotify playlists (but not discover new music), a calendar, weather, a notes app, and voice memos. There will never be a browser or games.

The phone is relatively sluggish to use, which I mostly put down to the slow refresh rate of the E Ink. But it works, to do the basic things it's supposed to do.

The Perfect Voice Phone?

I have the perfect voice phone in my mind, and the Light Phone II isn't quite it. But I'm wondering if what I want is entirely unrealistic. I want something narrow and slim that flips shut, cradles my face, and has the absolute finest voice quality. I want the EVS codec and state-of-the-art noise cancellation. I want it to receive diverse kinds of messages, but not really be able to reply easily.

The problem is, that desire runs up against a whole bunch of impossibilities in the phone market. Really good voice hardware, it turns out, costs a lot of money, or in the modern supply chain comes by default with a bunch of smartphone components you don't want in a voice phone. So we're left with really cheap devices with lackluster builds and poor performance, or artisanal phones like the Light Phone II and Punkt MP02 that end up more focused on design than performance.

That said, the Light Phone II comes closer than either the Palm Phone or the Punkt MP02 to the ideal of a classy, simple voice phone. It doesn't look or feel cheap. I like how it's made by a small, US-based startup where the founders are named and accessible. And there isn't much 4G voice calling competition on the Light Phone's compatible carriers I can be enthusiastic about. Verizon has a couple of so-so flip phones that can save you some money. The Sonim XP3 on AT&T is good, but also a brick. The Doro 7050 on Consumer Cellular has only gotten more unexciting with time. T-Mobile's Alcatel Go Flip is downright bad. In the absence of my imaginary perfect phone, the Light Phone II will have to do.

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