The simple Light Phone teams up with Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile, which pays you to stop scrolling

If you’re looking for a sign of a “dumb phone” experience, here it is: The trendy, minimalist Light Phone is teaming up with Noble Mobile, a phone network founded by entrepreneur and politician Andrew Yang that gives you money if you use less data.

On Tuesday, 500 Light Phone III models will be in stock and ready to ship via Noble Mobile. The catch is that you have to sign up for a two-year Noble mobile plan at $50 per month, which works out to $1,200 for the contract.

As those curious about the Light Phone know, this is the first time ever that the Light Phone III will be available immediately, and without paying its $699 upfront cost. If you were to buy the Light Phone III without the Noble Mobile plan, the company estimates you won’t get your phone until September.

“I think what’s exciting about launching Noble is not just that the barrier to entry is lower,” Joe Holler, Light co-founder, told TechCrunch. “It’s the first time we’ve ever had the Light Phone III available for immediate purchase.”

Holler and his co-founder Caiwei Tang met in 2014 at Google’s 30-week incubator, which was specifically geared to artists and designers. They created the Light Phone, a device that has generated a lot of buzz and curiosity over the past decade.

The Light Phone offers a compromise between an overly connected iPhone and a high-end phone with a T-9 keyboard, appealing to a growing audience of people who feel like they’re in a parasitic relationship with their smartphones. But as a small startup competing with huge producers like Samsung and Apple, Light Phone has struggled to ship its devices affordably without wait times; The constant lack of RAM doesn’t help either. Since the launch of the Light Phone III last spring, the company has shipped 20,000 devices.

The hope is that for some customers, the “advantage” of signing up for a Noble Mobile contract comes as a benefit. For a mobile plan with unlimited talk, text, and data, $50 per month is reasonable. But the trick behind Noble Mobile is that if you use less than 20GB of data in one month, you’ll get a dollar for every GB you don’t use (so, if you use 11GB of data in one month, you’ll get $9 off your $50 payment — and yes, you can also stay on Wi-Fi to keep your data usage low). You can get this payment in cash, or you can use them like credit card points, which can later be cashed out for rewards.

“The Light Phone is designed to be used as little as possible, so it belongs to the Noble brand,” Holler said.

How does a light phone work?

The Light Phone III has a lot of the basics you’d expect from a smartphone. Users can make phone calls, send text messages, and do other basic things, but Light’s creators also considered that modern life made it difficult to be a nerd. The device has a directions app and a guide app, which came in handy for one Reddit user who wrote about the experience of using the phone’s limited functionality to successfully find a tow company when their car broke down (“Thanks to the light phone, I was able to *intentionally* think through all my life decisions up to this point while waiting for 45 minutes,” they wrote).

Light Phone’s biggest challenge was knowing exactly what level of simplicity customers wanted. Is support for ride-sharing apps a safety feature or a capitulation to big tech? What if the customer wants to communicate with his international relatives via WhatsApp?

While most Light Phone customers use it as their primary phone, some users keep an old SIM-less smartphone, which they can use via the Light Phone hotspot in case they need it, Holler said. It’s an understandable compromise, but some users may be put off by the idea of ​​carrying two phones in the name of simplicity.

“It’s really interesting to see how people fit in [Light Phone] “Some people are actively switching between two phones, and we’ve seen a new trend of users actually getting two phone numbers, like a work phone and a balance phone at home,” Holler said. “It’s been really cool to see all the different ways people are using the Light Phone, because it’s not really a one-size-fits-all situation.”

Unlike previous versions of the Light Phone, the latest model has an OLED display, rather than an e-ink display. With the color OLED screen, the designers saw it possible to also add front and rear cameras, which will also be useful when the phone soon starts supporting video calls.