Say 'Hello' to the Anti-Smartphone
It doesn’t text. You can’t check your email. And no, it definitely doesn’t have Super Mario Run. The Light Phone is just that, a phone. Designed to rejuvenate those “aha” moments, the Light phone frees up your daily burden of buzzes, rings and alerts while still keeping in touch.
“You use this as little as possible! It’s a piece of mind, we call it, going light,” Joe Hollier, co-founder of Light tells FOXBusiness.com
You keep your same phone number and the Light Phone is available internationally, for those in the states you would need to sign up for an additional $5 a month plan. By forwarding your numbers via their cloud server, Light phone is meant to be used as a second phone. The $150 (white or black “Night” version) phone would allow you to leave your smartphone at home for that coffee run or dinner with the wife.
“We all have different clothes, different shoes for different situations. Why does it make sense to have one giant phone everywhere you go?” asks Kaiwei Tang, co-founder of Light Phone
This idea led the team to raise over $410,000 via a grassroots Kickstarter campaign. That opened the doors for angel investors who pumped in over $3.3 million dollars into the phone’s development. Based out of the innovative New Lab in Brooklyn, NY, Tang and Hollier are still shocked about its global appeal.
“We sold 4,000 phones but we saw this conversation snowballing in so many other ways, which is incredibly powerful to us,” adds Hollier.
Foxconn in China, the same company that manufactures Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) products, invested in the phone and is also the manufacturer. From the start, Tang and Hollier wanted to make it a priority to show the human side to the technology world.
“The whole process from material to assembly to packaging to getting the phone here is all human. It has thousands of humans involved if you really think about it. It’s mind boggling how huge this supply chain is” adds Tang.
Be sure to check out how Light phone works in the video above.