[iodiniemetra]

The biggest benefit this could have is a smart-ish phone with multiple days of active use battery life. Instead they specced a 500mah battery

Also it's $3-400. Insane.

I can get a commodity android phone for $150, remove all of the apps, and with a little self control have the same thing.

It looks good, though.

[com2kid]

> The biggest benefit this could have is a smart-ish phone with multiple days of active use battery life. Instead they specced a 500mah battery

Take any Android phone, uninstall all messaging apps, disable all other forms of background transfers and sync (increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS).

Enjoy your 3 to 4 day battery life.

You said active use, but this phone doesn't have any active uses, by design.

Standby time on modern smart phones isn't half bad, if you get rid of everything that wakes up the device!

[nullify88]

This.

Go to Settings / Battery and you can prevent or minimise a applications background cpu usage. Then go to your Data usage, from there you can prevent or minimize background data transfer.

This has greatly improved battery life on my phone.

[iainmerrick]

Turn off data and just use it for calls and SMS and it’ll last even longer (just like old Nokia phones used to).

Android used to let you disable 3G/4G data and just limit the phone to 2G data - - low bandwidth but adequate for syncing email and other tasks, much lower power usage. Unfortunately that option seems to have been removed.

[izacus]

That's because 2G networks are shutting down (together with 3G ones) and 4G/LTE ones are moved to lower, more efficient, frequencies previously taken by GSM.

Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.

[Fnoord]

Actually, 3G will be shut down first because so much relies on 2G networks.

> Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.

You can always have peace of mind with airplane mode or whole data disabled.

[iainmerrick]

Huh! That never occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Oh well. :/

[juliangoldsmith]

>increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS

You can get rid of most, if not all, of that with Lineage OS.

[iodiniemetra]

I was judging active by their standards. It's still very short.

[ddeck]

There doesn't even seem to be anything smart-ish about it, except that it uses the same form factor.

>It brings a few essential tools to the Light Phone, like messaging, an alarm clock, or a ride home

And yet further down it says that these are not even definite features, but "some features that we might explore".

Clearly the appearance is the selling point. From a utility perspective flip/button phones make a lot more sense if you're only using them as phones.

$300 seems quite a stretch when there are a huge variety of dirt cheap dumb phones around. How about a Jenny TV 2.8 [1] with 175 hours standby for $30 at Amazon?

Or a Nokia 130 with up to a month of standby, which sells for around $25 in India. [2]

[1] http://bluproducts.com/jenny-tv-2-8

[2] https://www.nokia.com/en_int/phones/nokia-130

[Cthulhu_]

If this one actually launches and gets a small following, I'm sure there will be copycats that are able to create and release better versions. I don't think this will be a commercial success but it may inspire others.

[VikingCoder]

With an eink display, shoudn't 500 mAh get you quite a bit?

Kindle Paperwhite is 1420 mAh...

[chrismorgan]

> Battery: 5 days standby; A few hours talk time.

[petecox]

It's the same Qualcomm chip as in smartwatches. Unlike a watch, calls will drain the battery.

[polshaw]

As soon as you tackle the display, the problem becomes android, and the need for connectivity, ie radios that are always/often on