Light Flip is a flip phone with minimalist design and features (plus a keypad and T9 predictive text)

The Light Flip is an upcoming cellphone that looks like an artifact from an alternate timeline where smartphones never took off. It has a class flip-phone design with a small screen on top and a number pad on bottom. And there’s a notification light on the cover, but no cover screen to distract you when the phone is folded closed.

But this is a modern device with support for 5G and 4G LTE networks, WiFi hotspot functionality, a USB Type-C port, and voice-to-text support. It comes with a handful of simple apps. But it’s not designed to compete with modern smartphones. Instead it’s the latest in a light of distraction-free, minimalist devices from Light Phone.

That means that, like last year’s Light Phone III, the new Light Flip has a black and white display and a simple operating system called LightOS that comes with basic “tools” including alarm, calculator, calendar, directory, directions, hotspot, music, notes/voice memo, podcast, weather, timer, and 2-factor authenticator. But millions of apps that are available for Android and iOS devices won’t run on this phone.

The makers of the Light Phone and Light Flip are open to adding some applications that many customers may find useful, even in a phone that’s meant to free you from the distractions of games, videos, and doomscrolling news and social media sites.

For example, the company notes that there are not currently apps for music streaming services. Rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft don’t work with LightOS. And popular messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp aren’t available. So the company has launched an SDK in hopes of encouraging developers to make some new apps that could be distributed via a “tool library,” which will basically be an app store for LightOS.

The Light Flip features a 2.8 inch, 480 x 640 pixel matte OLED display, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a MediaTek MT8873 processor with four Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores, four Cortex-A55 cores, and Mali-G615 MC2 graphics.

Other features include a user-replaceable 1800 mAh battery, stereo speakers, dual mics, a 3.5mm audio jack, dual SIM support (nano SIM + eSIM), a 12MP camera, and support for GPS and Bluetooth 5.0. The phone has a plastic body and it’s rated IP54 for dust and water resistance.

It’s expected to get around 36 hours of battery life and charges via a USB 2.0 Type-C port. The phone measures 110 x 58 x 19mm (4.33″ x 2.28″ x 0.75″) when folded, while weighing about 160 grams (5.64 ounces).

Available for pre-order now for $299 (or $39 per month with a 2-year service contract), the first batch of Light Flip phones aren’t expected to ship until April, 2027. But on the bright side, pre-order prices are $100 less than for the Light Phone III, which went up for pre-order for $399 in mid-2024.