The Lull One arrives in a box of pressed paper pulp, and the first thing you notice is its weight. At a little over one hundred grams, it feels less like a phone than a smooth river stone, cool and matte, with a small monochrome display that looks like printed paper. There is one physical button on the side. There are no app stores, no feeds and no notification badges. It is made by Hush Objects, a studio of nine designers in Copenhagen who previously built kitchen scales.
The premise is simple and radical: the phone never interrupts. Calls from a short list of favourites ring through. Everything else, including messages, email and calendar alerts, is collected silently and delivered in three batches a day, at times you choose. Between those windows, the screen shows only the time and the weather, rendered in a typeface so calm it seems almost sleepy. You can, of course, check manually. The designers have simply made it slightly tedious to do so.
The first week is the hardest
I will be honest about the first week, which was miserable. I reached for the phone perhaps two hundred times a day, pressed the button, saw nothing new and felt foolish. I missed a dinner invitation that arrived in the afternoon batch. I discovered how often I had used my old handset not to do anything but to avoid doing something else. By the fifth day, the reaching began to slow. By the tenth, I had started leaving the Lull One in another room.
The hardware is quietly superb. The display is readable in full sunlight and sips so little power that the battery lasted nine days between charges. The camera is basic and clearly an afterthought, which is presumably the point. Maps work, with turn-by-turn directions rendered as simple arrows. Music plays through a small, surprisingly warm speaker. There is a torch, a timer, a notebook and a calculator, and that is essentially the whole of it.
We did not want to build a phone that makes you feel virtuous. We wanted one you forget you are carrying. — Freja Holm-Aasen, Hush Objects
There are real frustrations. Two-factor authentication codes arrive in the batches unless you exempt them, a process that took me an irritating afternoon. Group chats become oddly formal when your contributions arrive hours late. Anyone whose work depends on responsiveness will consider it unworkable, and the designers admit as much; they describe it as a second phone for evenings and weekends rather than a replacement for the one in your pocket.
And yet, a month in, I am reluctant to give it back. My evenings have grown longer, or at least they feel that way. I have read three novels. The Lull One costs about the same as a mid-range smartphone, which some will think absurd for a device that does so little. But it is not really selling features. It is selling the particular luxury of being unreachable for a few hours, and on those terms it is excellent value.
