Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now 10 years in the making for Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Phone lighthe’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a foldable phone.
“We’ve been interviewing young people who have been using flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones, but say the build quality is poor. “They describe flip phones with negative language, but they stick with it and feel proud.”
So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from the last three touchscreen phones and put it on a cell phone? So they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device Light has ever released.
“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with the developer SDK, all the tools we already have today: alarm clock, calculator, calendar,” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s exactly the same experience, only one is fully tactile, no touch screen and [the other] One is a complete touchscreen experience.”
Pricing has always been Light’s toughest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “lesser” phone for a price people will actually pay when the whole game is less features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, costs $799. But the Light Flip drops the cost to $299, skipping the touchscreen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but this means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy and light grey.
“I thought I was full QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive messages [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number]so I can see myself calling back on the colors as well,” Hollier said. “Having just one yellow phone makes me so jazzed.”
Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing game. It recently signed pilot phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get Light Flip on a two-year contract for $39 per month. the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month at the same time.
The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as users have been asking for. However, there will be a small light on the front of the phone so you can see if you have notifications without opening the device. With 5G and 4G LTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM cards and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.
The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep pre-order customers engaged (and, practically, to prevent them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, featuring twice-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community building move as much as a marketing move. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less disruptive and that it will stick.
While Light believes its phones can help people reclaim time they might regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant Internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the curious to make that transition when they’re not going through it themselves.
“I think what’s so inspiring about this movement is that it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hate… It’s a movement of optimism as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti-Big Tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”
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