Most people wish they didn’t have a phone sometimes; scrolling Reels for 40 minutes instead of doing your taxes or getting spam calls at 7 a.m. will do that to you. Despite those frustrations, however, people aren’t generally willing to forego the advantages of modern apps and conveniences like texting, navigation, or streaming music, which leaves room (theoretically) for an in-between space—one that a company called Meadow thinks it can occupy.
Meadow just released a self-titled device that sits somewhere between a dumb phone and a smartphone, giving you basic features like calling and texting, as well as limited apps like navigation, Spotify, Uber, and weather. That means no email, social media, or web browser. It’s not just meant to be an accessory to your smartphone, either—Meadow comes with a 4G mobile connection enabled by an eSIM and is being positioned as a way to leave your big boy phone—with all its tantalizing distractions—at home. This is also where things get a little weird.
You’ll only be able to whitelist 12 contacts that will be able to reach you while you’re out and about with Meadow, while the rest are SOL. According to Meadow, “Your Meadow can directly text with contacts you add. If someone outside of your contacts gets a hold of your Meadow number, you’ll never see the unwanted texts.” On one hand, that’s great for getting rid of spam calls and the like, but on the other, it feels a little extreme since important calls and texts aren’t always coming from the 12 people closest to you.
Since Meadow is designed to be used independently, you’ll also need to cough up money for a subscription. Right now, it’s $10 a month for unlimited calls and texts after a nine-month free trial.
As for hardware, I do like how tiny this thing is. The screen is just three inches, and it weighs just 113g—about 64g less than an iPhone 17. There’s 128GB storage and 6GB memory, though Meadow doesn’t specify what chip is inside. There’s a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera, and Meadow says the battery can last for one to two days, though it doesn’t list the specific size of it. There’s also Bluetooth for linking wireless earbuds and a USB-C port if you want to go wired.
Conceptually and hardware-wise, I don’t hate the Meadow, but $450 (or $399 for early bird pricing) is a lot of money to pay for a semi-dumb phone that most people are only going to want to use in very specific circumstances. The deal becomes even less appealing when you consider that you can just, you know, buy an actual dumb phone for around $50 if you’re really that hellbent on taking a break from TikTok.
But hey, I don’t know your life—maybe you’ve got money to burn and an Instagram addiction fierce enough to warrant dropping several hundred dollars on a sort of dumb phone. If that’s the case, I guess Meadow makes sense, but for everyone else, willpower and patience will have to prevail over the endless stream of spam calls and distracting apps.
