Right now, on a desk in an unfinished basement of Eric Bouchard’s Ottawa home, sits a phone with 512MB of RAM and a 1-GHz processor. No, it’s not a Samsung Galaxy Pocket 2 from 2014. It’s a prototype for The Basic Phone, Bouchard’s entrance into the nascent “dumbphone” market. He thinks he can make it dumber.
Bouchard unveiled his Canadian creation, and the Kickstarter campaign to go along with it, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning. Bouchard told BetaKit in a Monday interview that, after building the prototype out of his garage (later his basement when the garage got too cold), the $200,000 CAD goal will pay his three-person team and get the device into the hands of those who are also tired of smartphones by Q1 or Q2 2027.
“I would want to release it right before Christmas in 2026 but obviously, you know, that’s an optimistic outcome,” Bouchard said.
Up until Sept. 2025, Bouchard was a solo developer making games and productivity apps for his namesake company, Bouchard Industries. But he was getting increasingly disillusioned with passive content consumption through social media and its impacts on mental health, particularly in youth. He decided he wanted to create something positive. “Dumbphones” are an emergent market, but none of them felt right, Bouchard said; the devices are often either too restrictive or too easy to circumvent.
Bouchard doesn’t like to call it a “dumbphone,” he said, but it’s the closest thing to what he’s trying to do with The Basic Phone. On top of his grievances with social media, Bouchard prefers devices to be more repairable, so he is making his device fully modular so users can repair it on their own using off-the-shelf hardware.
This will be even easier if he can bring the device’s specs all the way down to 8MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor, which would have been more than enough to run MS-DOS in 1995 but is now far less than the iPhone 17, which runs on 8GB (8192 MB) of RAM. Bouchard claims it’s possible because The Basic Phone’s user interface (UI) is so “lightweight.” Playing with his device’s power capabilities comes with the bonus effect of avoiding the current consumer RAM shortage, which has dramatically driven up prices thanks to demand from artificial intelligence data centres.
“The RAM we have is so [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 that of an e-reader, purposely makes the phone dull to look at, but still supports everyday utilities like GPS, two-factor authentication apps, and even ride-sharing, alongside typical email, text, and phone calls. The web browser, which operates in the cloud and is streamed to the device due to The Basic Phone’s deliberate hardware limitations, blocks access to “distracting” sites and apps like social media.
The way it’s set up now, Bouchard recognizes his team has control over what’s considered essential versus distracting for future Basic Phone users.
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“We don’t want to make it too annoying to use, because then people will just fall back to the old phone,” Bouchard said. “It’s a balance that we need to look into in the next full release, and obviously get some feedback from everyone.”
Bouchard announced his foray into the hardware market shortly after Clicks Technology debuted its reincarnated take on the BlackBerry, called the Communicator. The “dumbphone” push comes as younger generations become more aware of smartphone addiction, creating a market of minimalist devices such as Clicks, Punkt, Light Phone, and Minimal Phone.
While Clicks is marketing its Communicator as a “second phone,” Bouchard sees The Basic Phone as a main device. He said he loves technology, but recounted the “perfect balance” of yesteryear, when one would sit at the computer desk to check MSN Messenger, and return to real life after walking away from it.
“I think a lot of youth, like Gen Z’s, for example, they’re smart [and] they’re realizing that there’s a [smartphone] problem,” Bouchard said. “I believe we have a great balance that others don’t have right now.”
Feature image courtesy Eric Bouchard.