If you’ve been looking for a sign to try out a “dumb phone,” here it is: The modern, minimalist Phone light joins forces with Noble Mobilea phone network founded by entrepreneur and politician Andrew Yang that gives you money back if you use less data.
500 on Tuesday Light Phone III Models will be in stock and ready to ship via Noble Mobile. The problem is, you have to sign up for a two-year Noble Mobile plan at $50 a month, which comes to $1,200 on contract.
As those curious about the Light Phone may know, this is the first time the Light Phone III will be available immediately without paying the $699 upfront cost. If you were to buy the Light Phone III without the Noble Mobile plan, the company estimates you wouldn’t get your phone until September.
“I think what’s exciting about the Noble launch isn’t just that the barrier to entry is lower. It’s the first time we’ve ever had the Light Phone III available for direct purchase,” Light co-founder Joe Hollier told TechCrunch.
Hollier and co-founder Kaiwei Tang met in 2014 at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator, which is specifically aimed at artists and designers. They created the Light Phone, a device that has generated buzz and curiosity over the past decade.
The Light Phone offers a middle ground between a hyper-connected iPhone and a heavy-duty flip phone with a T-9 keyboard, appealing to an ever-growing audience of people who feel they have a parasitic relationship with their smartphone. But as a small startup competing with mass producers like Samsung and Apple, Light Phone struggles to ship its devices at an affordable price without waiting times. the ongoing Lack of RAM doesn’t exactly help either. Since launching the Light Phone III last spring, the company has shipped 20,000 devices.
The hope is that for some customers, the “catch” of signing up to a Noble Mobile contract is a benefit. For the Light Phone plan, Noble Mobile offers 5GB of data, with up to $5 back for every GB you don’t use — if you’re using a Light Phone, you’re probably not going to use much data, so it makes sense. (Noble Mobile’s plans typically include unlimited talk, text and data for $50 per month, with the option of up to $20 back for each unused GB of data below 20GB.)
“The Light Phone is designed to be used as little as possible, so it’s under the Noble brand,” Hollier said.
How does Light Phone work?
The Light Phone III has many of the basics you’d expect from a smartphone. Users can make phone calls, send messages and do other basic things, but Light’s creators also feel that modern life has made it difficult to be a Luddite. The device has a directions app and a directory app, which was helpful for a Reddit user who wrote about his experience using the phone’s limited functionality to successfully find a towing company when his car broke down: “thanks to the lightphone I was able to *intentionally* ponder all of my life decisions up to this point while waiting 45 minutes.” they wrote.
Light Phone’s biggest challenge was figuring out exactly what level of minimalism customers wanted. Is ride-share app support a safety feature or a capitulation to Big Tech? What if a customer wants to contact international relatives via WhatsApp?
Hollier said that while most Light Phone customers use it as their primary phone, some users keep an old SIM-free smartphone that they can use through the Light Phone hotspot in case they need it. It’s an understandable compromise, but some users may be put off by the idea of carrying two phones in the name of minimalism.
“It’s really interesting to see how people fit together [Light Phone] In their lives… Some people are actively switching between two phones and we’ve seen a new trend of users getting two phone numbers, like a work phone, a home phone,” Hollier said. “It’s been really cool to see all the different ways people fit into the Light Phone, because it’s not a one-size-fits-all situation.”
Unlike previous iterations of the Light Phone, the newest model features an OLED display rather than an e-ink display. With this color OLED display, the designers thought they could also add front and rear cameras, which will also prove useful when the phone soon starts supporting video calls.
However, Light’s founders hesitated before adding a camera to the Light Phone. Hollier and Tang are both film photographers, and while they appreciate that smartphones are expanding access to photography, they’ve also noticed that the maximalist nature of smartphone photography can detract from the true joy and purpose of the art form.
“We’ve talked to people who are like, I took 27,000 iPhone photos last year and I’ve looked at them zero times because it’s like, 10 of a meal,” Tang told TechCrunch. “I can tell you how many motion pictures I took last year.”
Ultimately, they decided that the camera is a necessary tool, but they still did it their way.
“We just tried to design our camera by removing what we felt was the culprit of people falling out of the moment, which is sharing and then waiting for that hit of dopamine reactions,” Hollier said. “On our camera, we added a physical shutter button and you can open it with a touch and you can half-press it to start focusing… We wanted it to be fun, kind of nostalgic. It doesn’t do any AI sharpening or masking your flaws. It’s just like an old point-and-shoot camera.”
The Light Phone still has some critical drawbacks — it doesn’t support industry-standard RCS texting, but instead relies on basic, insecure SMS. In practice, this means your group chat experience will be difficult, your messages won’t be end-to-end encrypted, and any photos and videos you send will be compressed. But maybe the target user is someone who doesn’t care if their texts might look weird to their iPhone-using friends. This user will likely also be someone who is excited about the mission behind Noble Mobile.
“It’s not about asking people to do it [either] give up their technology or use this AI 6G smartphone,” Tang said. “There is a middle ground to have the right technology tools that they design without the attention and advertising layer of it.”
Updated, 5/19/26, 1:45 p.m. ET with clarification on Noble Mobile’s Light Phone plan.
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