More hikers are leaving their smartphones at home — or at least deep in their packs — to escape the constant pull of notifications, email and doomscrolling. The trouble is that flip phones, the go-to replacement for anyone chasing a quieter day on the trail, take terrible photos. One Backpacker writer who made the switch thinks he has found a fix: the Life Camera S168, a tiny digital camera that weighs just 21 grams and costs around $30.
The S168 belongs to a new wave of retro-styled, thumb-sized digital cameras riding nostalgia for the disposable cameras many of us took to summer camp. The best-known of the bunch is the Kodak Charmera, which has been popping up in stores. But online reviewers consistently rate the Life Camera's photos and video noticeably better than its rivals — decent enough, at least, for someone who isn't chasing iPhone-quality images.
Why go through the hassle at all? For the writer, the swap to a flip phone has been genuinely restorative. On trail it covers the essentials: calls, texts, emergency access to 911, an MP3 player for podcasts at camp, even a basic mapping app — though he still carries a paper map and compass because he doesn't trust it. The only real gap was photography, and that gap was big enough that he'd been hauling his smartphone along purely to shoot pictures, which rather defeated the point of ditching it.
The honest verdict: this is a niche gadget, not a mass-market one. If your phone normally rides in your pocket on a hike, the S168 is redundant — your phone does everything it does, and in higher resolution. But for the growing subset of hikers who keep their phone switched off in the pack, or who carry a flip phone full time, it fills the one real hole in the setup. The resolution won't impress anyone, but it captures trail life in adequate detail, and the retro, lo-fi look is arguably part of the appeal.
For travellers, this taps into something bigger than a quirky gadget. The 'dumb phone on holiday' trend is gaining ground, and the same logic applies to a city break or a beach week as to a backpacking trip: a lightweight, cheap camera lets you document a trip without carrying the entire internet around in your pocket. At 21 grams and $30, the S168 is a low-risk experiment for anyone who suspects their phone is eating their attention. Just temper expectations — this is about presence and fun, not image quality.
