While there are so many things that we are experimenting with still, there are the inevitable realities of the technology that exists. This is unique to the Light Phone II and I think really sets it apart from other phones. The interface will always have a consistent background color and the elements will never get cut off by the edge of the screen which will help minimize how noticeable the screen border is. Our OS on the phone is designed to help make the screen feel “screen-less”. Interface Design: It’s not an aspect of the hardware challenge per say, but important to note here as well I think. In addition we’re also exploring layering other films within the stack. We used the same process in the original Light Phone as well simply because the reflection becomes so beautiful and it feels great to the touch. It’s an expensive process and we’re going through the scientific process of each variables of the etching process to get a perfect match. We’ve been experimenting with a process called etching to chemically etch the the top and/or bottom glass so that it will better resemble the matte E-ink paper. Naturally the glass is smooth on both sides, where as the surface of the E-ink Paper is matte and rough (on a granular level, not even to the touch really). Reflection: Even if there were absolutely no shadow and the colors were perfectly matched, you would still notice a difference of where the paint and screen met because of the texture of their surface and the way that it reflects light slightly differently. I should also mention that the shadow is more noticeable on the light gray phone than the black phone logically.

Of the three factors, the shadow is the most difficult (perhaps impossible) to completely eliminate. There are a few of the other ideas we’re experimenting with as well that seem promising. We‘ll continue to minimize the distance between the screen and paint, which I should mention is fractions of a millimeter. While many call this a “seam”, there is no tactile “seam” at all, it’s completely flush to the touch (the top glass is represented by dotted line in diagram), it’s just that in viewing from certain angles the shadow becomes visible (exaggerated here for reference). The distance between the underside of the Front Glass (paint layer) and the top of the E-ink Module creates a shadow when viewing from certain angles. The options seemed to be an OLED/LCD that you’d find on smartphones or an E-Ink screen like on a Kindle. Understanding how small our phone was we knew it had to have a high resolution. How could we add a screen and stay as close as possible to original form factor we loved and had, well, no screen? Choosing a Screen We needed a visible screen that could display a variety of information and interfaces (i.e searching contacts, reading message threads, having a QWERTY keyboard). Inevitably in making a Light Phone that could text, we had to make some design changes. There were a lot of reasons we ultimately decided we’d make a second phone, many of which we’ve discussed before, so I’ll skip talking about the reasons we expanded functionality or how it’s a different phone, not necessarily a replacement of the original Light Phone.

It was a beautiful object that represented a powerful experience of ‘going light’, but it did fall flat as a reliable, everyday tool.

The keypad drained battery quite fast for our simple functionalityĪlthough not great trade-offs in terms of utility, for the original Light Phone they were acceptable and actually almost aligned with the phone’s function (or lack thereof).

In daylight while competing against the sun, it was impossible to view.

In shining through the paint, the interface became fuzzy and less legible.

Things like changing time preferences were not intuitive with such a fixed keypad.

The keypad was fixed to the numbers, triangle and X.

There were of course some pretty serious trade-offs, to name a few. It was more challenging that makes it seem, but that’s how we pulled it off. The keypad would shine through a fully painted sheet of glass and become (mostly) visible through the front face of the phone when on and invisibly hidden when off. We achieved that by using a custom fixed light-up keypad.

Screen lights up but no display phone