Let's go back 30 years. I'm thinking of the mid 1990s. At that time nearly all of us wandered around with a paper planner or pocket calendar of some kind. Nobody had a backup, and if you lost your calendar you had to start from scratch and memory. Some of us tried things like the Apple Newton, and then eventually a Palm Pilot, and if you are lucky and lived in Europe you had a Psion.

    With the exception of Palm, nobody thought about backing up. Palm came along and helped us link a device to a desktop environment where our email and shared calendars sat. Perhaps we can blame them for the idea that a device in your pocket has to be backed up to another device that was your main computer. 

We didn't have an iPod yet, but we did have small MP3 players with wired headphones. Some people were big into cameras and would carry one of those along with everything else. But the reality was the desktop computer was seen as your main digital location, and in those years was likely to be the only thing that was connected to the internet such as it was. All of these various devices including that list of nostalgic PDAs, were simply designed to keep us organized and running while we were physically away from our desktop.

    Fast forward to today. Many of us have a single device that does literally everything including what that old desktop computer did. And because of the internet and cell service, our phones now make the physical location of a computer desktop obsolete. Everything we are connected to is available in a device in your pocket. And this device, in theory, is backed up to a cloud. In some cases, we have multiple calendars that we funnel into one space on our phones. Same with email. Of the many ways big Tech keeps its grip on us is this feeling of security in backing up everything that's on a phone into some kind of a cloud system like Apple or Google.

    What does this have to do with the light phone 3? In many ways, I see it as an attempt to go back to the non-backed up devices of 30 years ago. I don't see anything wrong with that as a philosophy and as an attempt to simplification. I truly can't remember the last time I lost a phone or erased a calendar. And with instant messaging of various brands, I don't know that I even need to be tied to email as closely as I used to be.

After a lot of back and forth in my own head, and truly recognizing that my needs as I enter retirement will actually fit the light phone very well, I plan to keep my pre-order knowing that it's unlikely to show up until the fall now.

I also hear the argument about supporting a startup that has potential and a proven track record. As somebody who does not live in the USA, the tariff roller coaster has got to be frustrating for a company like light. The way I read what they're doing is truly creating a device that doesn't rely on any of the big tech companies to function. Crazy as it seems, a lot of these posts here are essentially asking them to add big Tech back into their device. I'm not sure that fits the ethos.

    All of that said, I'm not going to be one of those people who asks Light to turn their new phone back into a smartphone. It looks like they already have an NFC chip installed, so I anticipate some kind of a wallet app will follow. I suspect there are more difficulties keeping the philosophy of a phone like this while trying to add messaging apps beyond SMS. I know that I live in a different Telecom environment than many, but I've also decided that this phone is going to be about me. If people want to get a hold of me, they can send an SMS. I don't have a lot to put in my calendar anymore, so I'm likely going to shift my daily use calendar to whatever it is the light phone supports. I've never used Spotify, nor have I ever used a ride hailing service. Bottom of the list for me if I were to ask for a feature.

    Is there a conclusion to my rambling? I think maybe there are two. The first is the world has adapted to smartphones and assumes that everybody has one and will use it for everything from payments to messaging to tickets to music etc etc. If you still live in that world then maybe this phone is not the best choice or maybe your use case relegates it to weekends and holidays? Or maybe you have a work phone and carry this phone as your personal phone?

    The second conclusion I come to is that this phone is aiming at a much more radical agenda than simply a response to all of those posts in the dumb phone forums with people asking for a dumb phone that does everything their smartphone does. The Light phone appears to be carving out a space where there is simply no need to be connected to anything bigger than what the light phone provides. No Google, no iCloud, no OneDrive, and none of the really big resource and data centric apps that we've grown accustomed to. 

Freedom has costs and it seems to me that the Light phone is laying those costs out right up front.