Light Flip: A 5G Flip Phone With No Social Media Apps to Fight Doomscrolling

Full text

The Light Flip is a flip phone designed to prevent you doomscrolling

It doesn't have social media apps or a touchscreen

But it does include 5G, an OLED screen, and other modern tech

If you’ve been looking for ways to spend less time on your phone then you might already be familiar with Light — a brand that makes distraction-free phones, designed to be used when needed but without the risk of you wasting hours doomscrolling.

Previously, these have been touchscreen slab phones like the Light Phone III , but now there’s the Light Flip, which takes the same principle and applies it to a flip phone.

It runs LightOS, which is a take on Android, but one without most of the apps. Instead, you just get basics like GPS, an alarm, a podcast player, and a calendar, among a handful of other tools.

The idea — according to the company’s home page — is that this phone should be used “as little as possible.”

As well as lacking apps, the Light Flip also lacks a touchscreen, instead leaving you reliant on a T9 keypad which — along with its tiny 2.8-inch display — is something else that should limit how much you want to use it.

Old-school style meets modern specs

Light Light But the specs are rather better than those of the old-school phones it’s inspired by, and include 5G, an OLED display, 128GB of storage, 6GB of RAM, and a 12MP camera. So it should perform rather more smoothly than phones of yesteryear.

The Light Flip isn’t cheap though, coming in at $299 (roughly £225 / AU$430), which seems quite a lot for such a basic phone, even if it is a lot cheaper than your average smartphone. And even if you are in the market for this kind of device, it has some competition from the recently announced Commodore Callback 8020 , which is a similar prospect but with wider Android app support (though it still blocks social media apps).

That phone is actually more expensive at $500 (around £375 / AU$715). Both phones are available to pre-order now, though while the Commodore is set to ship later this year, you won’t receive the Light Flip before April 2027.