forget doomscrolling: meadow shrinks the smartphone down to only the most essential apps

meadow is a phone for leaving your phone at home

Meadow is a unique phone made for the times you decide you would rather leave your smartphone behind. The device is only three inches square, with a touchscreen taking up most of its face and a deliberately short menu of things it can do. Calls and texts are there. So are maps and Uber. Spotify and Apple Music cover music, while tickets can be pulled up at the door to a concert or event.

It looks almost like somebody cropped a smartphone down to its useful corner. The proportions are chunky and a little odd, especially beside the long black rectangles we have grown used to carrying. Meadow runs on Android, though there is no open app store waiting to fill the screen back up again. The software comes with a fixed group of services chosen around getting somewhere, meeting someone, listening to something, then heading home.

images courtesy Meadow

the camera makes you wait

The camera is where Meadow gets more interesting. There is a rear lens and a tiny mirror beside it for framing a selfie, while the usual front-facing camera disappears altogether. You can still take photos and video, but they are sent away to sync later instead of appearing instantly for review on the screen.

It changes a familiar little gesture. Take the picture, put the phone away. There is no immediate zooming in, deleting, retaking or passing the screen around for approval. Meadow still gives you the photograph. It simply separates taking it from looking at it.

the small device works independently from a user’s primary smartphone

a second phone comes with a second number

Meadow has its own cellular connection and phone number, so it works independently from the smartphone sitting back at home. Service runs on T-Mobile in the US, with plans beginning at $15 per month. That makes the whole setup more involved than switching on a stripped-back mode on an iPhone, though the physical separation is also the point. The distracting device is somewhere else.

The first larger batch has now begun reaching preorder customers. Meadow enters a growing category of phones built around doing fewer things, but its design feels especially literal: take the pieces of a smartphone that help you move through a city and put them into a much smaller object. Meanwhile, everything else can wait.

Meadow pairs a three-inch square touchscreen with a deliberately limited set of apps