Key Takeaways
- The Gentle Cellphone 3 gives upgrades like an OLED display and cameras for a extra trendy expertise.
- Different {hardware} enhancements embrace a steel body, 5G, and an NFC chip
- You possibly can pre-order the product for $399, but it surely’s solely transport in January 2025.
Gentle — the creator of the deliberately stripped-down Light Phone 2 — launched the cellphone’s successor on Tuesday. Though nonetheless minimalist to scale back distractions, the Light Phone 3 contains a lot of upgrades to make it extra related in 2024, most noticeably a change from e-ink to a 3.92-inch, black-and-white OLED display. That is primarily to enhance refresh charges, though the corporate has additionally added a scrollwheel to regulate brightness, which might be clicked to set off a flashlight.
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The Gentle Cellphone 3 furthermore has cameras now, particularly a 50-megapixel unit on the rear, and an eight-megapixel shooter on the entrance. Each have a hard and fast focal size with heart focus, and whereas there is a devoted two-step shutter button, you are not even meant to edit the images or movies you shoot on-device.
Different {hardware} enhancements embrace a steel body, USB-C, 5G assist, fingerprint recognition, and an NFC chip that might finally assist cellular funds, in keeping with The Verge. Inside specs embrace a Qualcomm SM 4450 processor, 128GB of storage, 6GB of RAM, and a replaceable battery.
Even the software program interface is rather less minimalist. There are actually devoted apps for music, notes, podcasts, calendars, and navigation, and the corporate is reportedly trying to combine Spotify, Uber, and Lyft. Different future prospects embrace sending voice notes, Beeper for messaging, and hooks for generative AI, though none of this stuff are assured to come back to fruition.
Pricing and launch date
Pre-orders for the Gentle Cellphone 3 are already open at a value of $399, however the gadget remains to be very a lot in growth and will not ship till January 2025. Its closing retail worth may very well be as excessive as $799, however Gentle co-founder Kaiwei Tang tells The Verge that this would possibly come down if the corporate can promote sufficient models to scale back manufacturing prices.
There may very well be some probability of that. Tang claims that the Gentle Cellphone 2 is definitely promoting higher than ever, regardless of it being 5 years previous. The follow-up is likewise meant to have a protracted shelf life, any sudden trade shifts however. It may in idea last as long as 10 years, which is one cause why it has a replaceable battery, and why the display and USB-C port are engineered to be straightforward to restore.
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