The minimalist Light Phone III is officially available for purchase

Light, the company behind a pair of minimalist handsets, just released the Light Phone III. This is the perfect device for those who are tired of modern smartphones, with their easy access to doomscrolling and their abundance of wonky AI tools. 

The Light Phone III features a sleek black-and-white OLED display, which is a new design element. The previous models included e-paper screens. The big draw, however, is not what this phone has but what it doesn’t have. There are no third-party apps. There’s no access to social media, the internet or even email. It’s intended to be, first and foremost, a phone.

It’s not completely bare. This model includes an embedded NFC chip for making payments, a bare-bones music player, a podcast player, a messaging app, a flashlight, voice notes, a calendar, a timer and an alarm. It also includes a simple camera system that was inspired by point-and-shoot models. There’s a two-step shutter button with center focus and a fixed focal length. The company calls it “genuinely fun.”

The Light Phone III has a navigation app, which is likely the most useful part of modern smartphones, but with a twist. The company paid for private access to navigational information, so Google won’t get ahold of any tracking data.

Other specs include 6GB of RAM, up from 1GB in the Light Phone II, 128GB of memory and a newer Qualcomm chip. It includes a fingerprint ID on the power button, a USB-C port and some loudspeakers at the bottom. The battery is also user-replaceable, which is a huge bonus. It’s larger than previous generations and I find it to be pretty cute. It's around the width of a modern iPhone, but much shorter. This was on purpose, the company says, to make it easier to text while holding it vertically.

There is a spot of bad news here. The Light Phone III costs $800, which dwarves the price of the second-gen model. It was available for much cheaper as a pre-order bonus, but those days are gone.

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