The Light Phone

Time to Disconnect and Live in the Moment

As technology fosters ever more connections through social media, and seemingly ever more distractions from our lived experiences, more and more people are beginning to see just how anti-social this can actually be. That’s why Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang designed the Light Phone: a credit card-sized phone, for calls only.

That’s right, no tweeting, no Instagram, no apps, no checking statuses or work emails when you should be relaxing. Just simple calls.

“We were seeing all these things people were building: apps, smart watches and all claiming to ‘give you time back, give you your life back,’ but they just were so off, we kept thinking what about our train of thought or focus,” Joe and Kaiwei explained.

“The last thing the world needed was another app and we wanted to build products that helped people live in the moment”. We just had to find out more about this new invention, so we asked Joe and Kaiwei to tell us some more.

The Plus: The interface is quite minimal. What kind of feedback are you expecting from the users?
Joe Hollier & Kaiwei Tang: The Light Phone was designed to be used as little as possible and the interface is designed with the same purpose. The last thing we want is to distract users with a complex interface and menu. We expect people to be able to make or receive calls with ease and be able to quickly go back to live their life.

TP: What materials did you use for the casing?
JH & KT: We are still evaluating different materials, but the plastic material for the casting needs to have good transparency and ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) is one of our options. That being said, ABS is not particularly strong and might be too fragile for such a small phone.

TP: What if the lights go off? Could you tell us some more about the battery life?
JH & KT: The LED lights are off in standby mode and will only light up when the user turns on the phone or receives an incoming call. The battery life is estimated at 20 days standby.

TP: What has been the biggest challenge during the process so far?
JH & KT: Prototyping with our very limited resources is very challenging. And that is why we are taking the idea to Kickstarter and looking for support from all the backers.

You can support Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang’s Light Phone project on Kickstarter here.