If you’re looking for a sign to try a “dumb phone”, here it is. The trendy, minimalist Litephone has partnered with Noble Mobile, the phone network founded by entrepreneur and politician Andrew Yang, to refund your money if you use less data.
On Tuesday, 500 Light Phone III models will be in stock and available for shipping through Noble Mobile. The problem is, you have to sign up for a two-year Noble Mobile phone plan that costs $50 per month, and the subscription fee is $1,200.
As you may know if you’re interested in the Light Phone, this is the first time the Light Phone III is available immediately with no $699 upfront payment. If you purchase the Light Phone III without a Noble Mobile plan, the company estimates you won’t get your phone until September.
“I think what’s exciting about Noble’s launch is not just the low barrier to entry; it’s the first time you can buy the Light Phone III out of the box,” Light co-founder Joe Hollier told TechCrunch.
Hollier and co-founder Kaiwei Tang met in 2014 at Google’s 30-week incubator 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 clunky flip phone with a T-9 keypad, appealing to a growing group of users who feel they have a parasitic relationship with their smartphones. But as a small startup competing with mass-manufacturers like Samsung and Apple, Light Phone has struggled to ship devices at affordable prices without waiting times. The ongoing lack of RAM doesn’t help at all either. Since the Light Phone III launched last spring, the company has shipped 20,000 devices.
The hope is that some customers will benefit from the “perks” of signing up for a Noble Mobile contract. For plans with Light Phone, Noble Mobile offers 5 GB of data and can set you back up to $5 for every 1 GB you don’t use. If you’re using a Light Phone, this makes sense because you probably don’t use much data. (Noble Mobile’s plans typically include unlimited talk, text, and data for $50 per month, with the option to get up to $20 back for every 1 GB of unused data under 20 GB.)
“Light Phone is a Noble brand because it’s designed to be used as little as possible,” says Hollier.
How does Litephone work?
The Light Phone III has many of the basic features you would expect from a smartphone. Users can make phone calls, send text messages, and do other basic things, but Light’s creators also believe that modern life has made it harder to become addicted. The device comes with directions and directory apps, which one Reddit user found useful when they wrote about how they used their phone’s limited capabilities to successfully find a towing company when their car broke down (“My phone allowed me to *intentionally* think about all the decisions I’ve made in my life while waiting for 45 minutes,” they wrote).
Light Phone’s biggest challenge was figuring out exactly what level of minimalism their customers wanted. Is rideshare app support a safety feature or a capitulation to big tech? What if a customer wants to communicate with relatives overseas via WhatsApp?
Hollier said that while most Litephone customers use it as their primary phone, some users keep older smartphones without SIM cards that they can use via the Litephone hotspot if needed. It’s an understandable compromise, but some users may be put off by the idea of carrying around two phones in the name of minimalism.
“It’s really interesting to see how people fit in.” [Light Phone] “Some people are actively switching between two phones. We’ve seen a new trend where users are actually getting two phone numbers, sort of a balance between a work phone and a home phone. It’s really great to see people adapting their light phones in different ways because it’s really not a one-size-fits-all situation,” Hollier said.
Unlike previous Light Phones, the latest model has an OLED screen instead of an e-ink screen. The designers thought it would be better to use that color OLED screen and add a front and rear camera. This will also come in handy when mobile phones start supporting video calls soon.
Still, Light’s founders hesitated before adding a camera to the Light Phone. Hollier and Tan are both film photographers, and while they appreciate the expanded access to photography afforded by smartphones, they also recognize that the maximalist nature of smartphone photography can devalue the actual enjoyment and intentionality of the art form.
“Last year, I took 27,000 photos with my iPhone and looked at them zero times. That’s like 10 for one meal,” Tang told TechCrunch. “You know how many film photos I took last year.”
Eventually they decided that a camera was a necessary tool, but they still did it their way.
“We just tried to design the camera by removing what we felt was the thing that actually caused people to drop out of the sharing moment and waiting for that dopamine-blast response,” Hollier said. “We added a physical shutter button to our camera, so you can open it with one touch and start focusing with a half-press. We wanted it to be nostalgic and fun. There’s no AI sharpening or covering up blemishes. It’s just like the old compact cameras.”
Light Phone still has some significant drawbacks. It does not support industry standard RCS text messages and instead relies on basic and insecure SMS. In practice, this means your group chat experience will be unstable, your messages won’t be end-to-end encrypted, and the photos and videos you send will be compressed. But your target audience might be people who don’t care if their texts look weird to their iPhone-using friends. That user could be someone who is excited about the mission behind Noble Mobile.
“This is not what I ask people to do. [either] “You either give up on technology or you use this AI 6G smartphone. There is a middle ground where you have the right technology tools that allow you to design without attention or advertising layers,” Tan said.
Updated 5/19/26 at 1:45 ET to add information about Noble Mobile’s phone plans with Light Phone.
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