New phone, nice to see the pricing somewhat balanced at $299…
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Link: The Light Phone
Non-ref Link: The Light Phone
I got to see this earlier this year. Very excited about it.
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It looks like this phone wont be shipping for a long while.
First batch ships April 2027.
6 GB of RAM is unecessary and raises costs without providing value.
1800 mAH battery is pretty small, I can’t imagine this having great battery life.
The E-ink screen saves battery
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The screen is OLD, not eink.
Android 16 and community apps will need the RAM
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6 GB is great for a smartphone
4 GB is more than enough for a smart minimalist phone that isn’t running heavy bloated apps or browsing the web.
Right now I’m typing this from an old laptop with 6 GB of RAM, and it works great, only stuttering down when I have 5+ tabs open in my browser.
You don’t need that for a flip phone.
I stand corrected. Didn’t really look into the details much. Just assume they would use E-ink, but I forgot, even the Light Phone 3, they changed it to OLED
Put simply, you can’t really compare RAM in your computer to RAM in your phone
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Does it have a touchscreen?
Very true.
Most phones run a lot better when tight for RAM and storage, than even many Linux distros do.
Android is very well optimized for stability on constrained resources.
The thing is that Android is also optimized for smartphones and therefore bundles packages and services that are unnecessary for dumbphones.
So if you take stock AOSP, and then slap a React layer on top, then yeah, you might need 6 GB of RAM.
Sort of how Windows 11 needs more than 8 GB of RAM for everyday tasks, not because those tasks need such generous specs, but because WinSlop is so bloated.
But if you’re a little more responsible, and slim down and optimize the Android base, then 4 GB of RAM should be fine.
The Keyphone has 4 GB of RAM and runs Android 15, and works beautifully.
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My mistake, it won’t be touchscreen.
It’s also 5G
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Cool, I like it. I wish it didn’t have this style OS, would’ve been nice to have it colorful
That’s the whole point of the Light Phone.
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I was listening to the waveform podcast, the podcast of Marques Brownlee, the famous YouTube tech reviewer.
He claims it’s very hard to justify the $300, which I might agree to because it’s not customizable or even out of the box possible to add apps and so on. It’s just what they think is minimal.
Additionally I don’t think there’s anything major we can do with this 6 GB of RAM at all. What will you do, run maps while making a phone call?
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What do you mean? The Light Flip is customizable and you can add apps. Surprised a tech reviewer doesn’t get it right.
Light tries to make their phones minimalist not by restricting apps, but by giving you a phone that only has their custom minimalist UI across the entire phone.
Same as what Sunbeam and Keyphone try to do.
Allowing standard Android apps would ruin that experience.
That’s why they’re making their own SDK, to allow people to make apps for The Light Phones that keeps to Light’s custom UI.
Anyone who didn’t get that point completely missed the point of the Light Phone, and their reviews are worthless.
The 6 GB of RAM is probably needed because LightOS is a React Native skin on top of AOSP, which obviously isn’t very resource efficient.
Either way, I don’t know what you would want to do on a dumbphone that would make good use of 6 GB of RAM.
Its very easy to take off btw, did it for someone once. Its a decent phone when its back on android