You can't log into TikTok, but you can call an Uber.
Right now, sitting on a table in the unfinished basement of Eric Bouchard's Ottawa home is a phone with 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor. No, this is not the 2014 Samsung Galaxy Pocket 2. This is the prototype for The Basic Phone, Bouchard's entry into the nascent “dumb phone” market. He thinks he can make it stupider.
Bouchard presented his Canadian creation, and Kickstarter campaign to go along with it at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning. Bouchard told BetaKit in an interview on Monday that after building a prototype in his garage (later in the basement when the garage got too cold), the C$200,000 goal will allow his three-person team to get the device into the hands of those also tired of smartphones by the first or second quarter of 2027.
“I would like to release it right before Christmas 2026, but obviously, you know, that's an optimistic outcome,” Bouchard said.
Until September 2025, Bouchard was a solo developer creating games and productivity apps for his eponymous company. Bouchard Industries. But he became increasingly disillusioned with passive consumption of content via social media and its impact on mental health, especially in youth. He decided he wanted to create something positive. “Dumb phones” are an emerging market, but none of them seem right, Bouchard said; these devices are often either too restrictive or too easy to bypass.
Bouchard doesn't like to call it a “dumb phone,” he said, but that's the closest thing to what he's trying to do with The Basic Phone. Social media grievances aside, Bouchard prefers devices to be more repairable, so he makes his device completely modular so users can repair it themselves using off-the-shelf hardware.
This will be even easier if he can downgrade the device to 8MB of RAM and a 200MHz processor, which would have been more than enough to run MS-DOS in 1995, but is now much less than the iPhone 17, which runs on 8GB (8192MB) of RAM. Bouchard claims this is possible because Basic Phone's user interface (UI) is very “lightweight.” Playing with his device's capabilities has the bonus effect of avoiding the current consumer RAM shortage that has driven prices soaring thanks to demand from artificial intelligence data centers.
“Our RAM is like this [low-end] that it doesn’t matter at all,” Bouchard said. “That’s the beauty of it right now for me.”
The device's e-ink display, like an e-reader, intentionally makes the phone look dull, but still supports everyday utilities like GPS, two-factor authentication apps, and even ride sharing, along with regular email, text messages, and phone calls. The web browser, which runs in the cloud and streams to the device due to The Basic Phone's intentional hardware limitations, blocks access to “distracting” sites and apps such as social media.
Bouchard understands that with the current setup, his team can control what is considered important and distracting to future Basic Phone users.
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“We don't want it to be too tedious to use because then people will just go back to the old phone,” Bouchard said. “It's a balance we need to explore in the next full version and obviously get feedback from everyone.”
Bouchard announced his foray into the hardware market shortly after Click Technology. debuted in his reincarnation on BlackBerry called Communicator. Pressing a “dumb phone” goes like this: younger generation become more aware of smartphone addictioncreating market minimalistic devices such as Clicks, Punkt, Light Phone and Minimal Phone.
While Clicks positions its Communicator as a “second phone,” Bouchard views the Basic Phone as a primary device. He said he loves technology, but talked about the “perfect balance” of yesteryear, when you could sit at your computer desk, check MSN Messenger, and return to real life after stepping away from it.
“I think a lot of young people, like Gen Z, are smart. [and] they understand what is there [smartphone] Problem,” Bouchard said. “I think we have a great balance that others don’t have right now.”
Image courtesy of Eric Bouchard.
