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For those who are committed to—or curious about—dumbphone life, the Light Phone III hews a cautious third path: dabbling with carrying a photo album and a camera in your pocket, making it easier to fit in with the crowd, in a way, yet still adamantly offline in the important senses of having no email, no internet, and no social media.

And Mr Silberbaum concedes that the resulting handset may well end up being something that sits somewhere between a dumbphone and a smartphone.

At age 17, Davida Rimm-Kaufman gave up her smartphone to finish high school with a so-called dumbphone, worried that an “extreme addiction” to social media was making her stressed and sad.

Jacobs finds that one of the remarkable things about his dumbphone is that “It’s just a phone. I don’t think about it. I even accidentally leave the house without it sometimes. It’s not me in the way my iPhone was.”

Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone.