This is a review of a non-flyfishing product—the Light Phone III—but it has serious implications for flyfishers.

I am betting there are some flyfishers out there who are sick of their smartphones, for one reason or another. Done with the internet hellscape in your palm; too much work email spilling through your hours away from the office; tired of obligatory upgrades and surveillance capitalism.

I am here to tell you that there is now a very good alternative.

A couple years ago I got rid of my iPhone and never looked back. In its stead, I got a Light Phone II: a “dumbphone,” for just calls and text messages. I wrote about making this transition for Slate.

The only things I missed were: 1) the camera, for taking pictures of the fish I caught daily near my home in New Orleans, and 2) the Notes app for drafting essays and parts of books. (The Light Phone II screen was tiny, and the typing interface and landscape format just clunky enough that I never wrote more than a few words at a time.)

Above: The Light Phone III and two flies (on size 10 hooks, for scale) tied for Missouri fish. Photo taken on author’s partner’s iPhone.

Now look at me: I have typed several paragraphs on my new Light Phone III, and it is way easier than it used to be. And I took pictures of fish I caught this morning in the lagoons of Forest Park, near my home in St. Louis.

The Light Phone III is a significant upgrade but still minimalist and quiet—no internet, no social media, no nagging work messages bleeding into my life at off-hours. It takes nice photos, but if you try to text them, they get pixelated, so you’re not tempted to go crazy with selfies and whatnot, sending them to all your contacts. You have to transfer them later, over a USB cable, to see the lushness of the phots.

This morning was moody, cool in the 40s, but we’d had enough warm days that the bluegills and bass were starting to cruise the channels and scouting spawning areas. Here’s the spot I fished:

Here: Forest Park in St. Louis, MO. Photo taken on Light Phone III.

Below is a bluegill that hit a size 10 cyclops-headed olive woolly bugger. Notice the soft hue of the purple on the back, and the rich yellow gold belly. I was a bit clumsy taking the picture, as I am still getting used to the new phone’s dimensions—but that is one gorgeous fish!

While I was fishing this morning, I never was tempted to doomscroll or worry I was missing out compared to someone else’s fabulous life. I just wandered around the edges of this artificial stream, casting toward submerged branches and looking for signs of fish in the shallows. When I took photos, I took them slowly: the Light Phone III’s two-step shutter system ensures you don’t just fire off 10 pictures of the same thing, hoping that one ends up looking good. You have to pay a little more attention.

When I used to fish with my iPhone handy, I would capture simple images of whatever fish I caught, and then I collected these as a kind of journal or record. They added up. Here’s a grid from a few months in 2022:

Once I gave up my iPhone, this was the one thing I missed: being able to capture in pictures the fish I caught. I could look back at when I took certain pics, see what fly I was using, and determine which fish were active then—and adjust my tactics accordingly.

Since I moved to Missouri, I have had numerous outings where I haven’t taken a single picture of the many trout, long-ear sunfish, bass and crappie that I have caught. But a couple times I cheated: I charged up my old, cracked iPhone and took it with me when I fished—I couldn’t resist.

Above: A wild McCloud rainbow caught in a spring-fed stream in the Ozarks. Photo taken on resurrected iPhone 5.

Now I am glad to be able to use the Light Phone III to take infrequent, slow pictures of the fish I catch when I go out—without having to slum it again with the old iPhone in my pocket.

Adopting a Light Phone is a radical break, and I highly recommend it. I’ve loved my original for two years. But the new features on the model III make it inch closer to the smooth utility many of us have come to expect from the latest smartphones—mostly in a good way. I won’t get into all the granular details here—the upgrades and improvements from the II to the III—but suffice to say that if you’ve fantasized about making the jump down to a dumbphone, but were hesitating, now there is a very good option.

With the Light Phone III you can shed all the clinginess of the smartphone dystopia happening in your pocket, and still have pictures to show of your fish—and a better writing platform, too, if you like to do things with words.

Christopher Schaberg is the author of nine books, including Fly-Fishing (2023).