For the last 4 weeks, I’ve been using a Jelly Star phone. This is an Android phone with a 3-inch diagonal screen and a chonky body. You can read reviews of it on other sites: here, I’m going to explain why I replaced my Light Phone 2 with this, and what I’ve had to adjust.
It comes down to interoperability, essentially. Not having a camera, even a crappy one, and not being able to display photos, meant that I had to pull out my laptop a lot in order to keep up with conversations. The tedium of using a high-latency keyboard also meant I just didn’t bother participating in conversations much. The bare-bones podcast player was kind of a chore. The music player worked, but I mostly used my laptop for podcasts and music. That’s… sort of how they’re advertising it. You’re supposed to get this phone in order to use your phone less. Well, it worked. But it turned out I didn’t want to use my phone that much less.
The Jelly Star is quite small, about the size of three Nokia candybar phones stacked on each other. Because it actually fits into my pockets, I’m not constantly reminded it’s there. It’s like my keyring now: it’s a thing I have when I need it, but it doesn’t otherwise grab my attention. I can’t overstate what a difference it makes to have something small. I had to use the Pixel 6 for a week or so after my daughter ran off with the first Jelly Star I was trying, and it was surprising how a large device grabs your attention just by its sheer size. I doubt this phenomenon has been lost on the device manufacturers.
Because the Jelly Star will never ever get a security update, I removed almost everything that could pull down general resources from the Internet. Images in particular are something I want to avoid downloading, having spent the better part of my career cleaning up after malware that uses image rendering exploits. So I either removed, disabled, or never installed: a web browser, an email client, a password manager, any sort of social media app, any kind of banking app, a podcast player (they pull in cover images). I turned off link previews in the messages app. I disabled the Google app, Keep, Assistant, Drive, Google TV. I won’t install any app that has ads (those are images, usually).
I did find an audiobook app with no external images, which I actually like a lot: it’s about 300kB and is in black and white, so my usage pattern is “open app, hit play, turn off phone”. I’m using YouTube Music for podcasts, which I verified re-encodes images before handing them to my phone. The interface is pretty bad, but it’s no worse than the Light Phone 2’s podcast player, so whatever.
The big change now is that I get RCS messages, and can use Messages for Web on my laptop. I checked the last two weeks, and I seem to be using the phone about 15 minutes a day now, mostly because I can do all my texting on my laptop with a real keyboard, which is great. I’d wager I’m using this phone even less than I used the Light Phone. Battery seems to last over 2 days with this usage pattern.
Oh, and Bluetooth works. I can turn the volume of my earbuds up and down with this phone. The Light Phone 2 broke the volume button over Bluetooth in the most recent release, and I haven’t seen any updates for months.
It feels kind of like giving up, but it also feels like iOS and Android are the only realistic options at this point. The Light Phone team did a good job making a solid device, but they’re a small team whose attention seems to have been sucked into this never-ending backorder on the Light Phone 2 and the imminent release of the Light Phone 3. Maybe one day they’ll get volume controls working on Bluetooth again.
So that’s where I am now. Back on Android, removed basically everything but messaging, calculator, music, audiobooks, podcasts, and a couple travel apps (TripIt, Amtrak, ChargePoint). Using the phone less than I used the Light Phone 2, because having Android gives me a ticket to bringing text chat back onto a laptop.