In Gimmick or Gamechanger, the Backpacker editors test hiking gadgets to see what’s worth your money—and what’s a waste of it.
In late 2025, I finally got fed up with my smartphone. Sure, it made staying in touch with my friends and family simple, let me keep tabs on my job when I was away from my computer, and put any information I could possibly want at my fingertips. But that was the problem: Everyone seemed to expect an instant reply from me, and I lost hours to doomscrolling and browsing aimlessly. Leaving my device off wasn’t an option (I have kids in school, not to mention emergencies—who wants to wait for their phone to boot up while their house burns down?). Instead, I took inspiration from the growing number of Gen Z’ers who are ditching their smartphones and bought a $15 flip phone from my local supermarket.
Mostly, my dumb phone has been perfect. It can send texts and make calls, play MP3s and podcasts, and even has a rudimentary GPS app. It’s about a third lighter than my Android, too. But it has one big drawback: Its camera sucks. The photos it snaps look like they were taken through vaseline-smeared glass, while the videos it shoots are usually too pixelated to tell what’s going on. I’ve found myself carrying my smartphone on trail just to have a working camera to capture my hikes. In hopes of preserving my digital peace, I went looking for a less-connected solution.
A dedicated point-and-shoot would add more weight and bulk to my pack than I wanted. Instead, I opted for a keychain camera. If you’ve seen a Kodak Charmera, the retro-inspired, thumb-size digital camera that launched in late 2025 and immediately spawned a legion of dupes, you know what I’m talking about. I opted for a Life Camera S168, a $30 direct-from-manufacturer model which reviews suggested had the best image quality of the bunch, and took it dayhiking in Vail, Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Range, and Colorado National Monument on a family road trip through western Colorado.
The Life Camera S168 by the Numbers
Out of the box, the most striking thing about the Life Camera is its size. It’s tiny, at just 21 grams and about the size of a pack of gum. The camera’s plastic body features three buttons—a shutter on top and two smaller buttons on the side for navigating menus. A screen on the back is just big enough to line up shots.
Image-wise, the Life Camera has a 2 megapixel camera—compare to 48 MP for a modern iPhone—with an available flash; in keeping with the retro theme, it has several selectable filters, which I mostly steered clear of. The Life Camera’s manufacturer claims it can shoot 2K video, which is lower resolution than most modern smartphones but still better than many budget Android models, at least on paper.
The Life Camera uses MicroSD for storage, and can take cards of up to 128GB in size; to transfer data, you can either pop the card in your phone or laptop, or use the included USB-C connector. The 180mAh battery recharges through USB-C as well.
How does it perform?
When I first started hiking as a kid, I usually had a disposable camera in my pack. If you’re too young to remember the 90s, these were primitive point-and-shoot cameras that came preloaded with a single roll of film. Some had a flash, but other than that, there was nothing adjustable about them: They had a fixed shutter speed and focus, and while they were good for capturing memories, their image quality was unimpressive.
I bring this up because the Life Camera S168 reminds me of nothing so much as a disposable camera: It’s easy to use, but the results are distinctly lofi. While the images were legible enough for a camera the size of my car’s keyfob, they were grainy too, and couldn’t capture fine details. Like an old disposable camera, I got the sense that the Life Camera’s snapshots would look good printed out as a three-by-five, but they looked pretty rough if I zoomed in much further than that. (The images in this story have been white-balanced, but otherwise I didn’t edit them.)
Bright light was a particular weak point of the Life Camera. In landscape shots, the sky often looked blown out, with clouds dissolving into formless white patches—a pretty major shortcoming for a hiking camera. While it fared better with detail shots, my blonde-haired, pale-skinned kids looked like Casper if I didn’t frame them carefully.
Video quality was a similar story: retro, and not always in a good way. The picture looked like that of a digital camcorder from 20 years ago, with visible grain in the image and colors that often looked washed out. It wasn’t terrible, exactly—even displayed full-screen on my laptop, it was reasonably detailed, and I never struggled to make out facial features—but if I had bought this assuming I’d get the 2K video promised on the box, I’d have been sorely disappointed. (It’s worth mentioning that the Life Camera shoots video in AVI, which my Android can’t natively play. I had to download an app to display it.)
Is the Life Camera 168 a gimmick or a gamechanger?
For the 99 percent of hikers who are perfectly happy carrying their smartphones in their pockets, it’s safe to say the Life Camera is a gimmick. Even the most bare-bones budget phones have far more powerful cameras, and with built-in quality features like shake reduction and HDR modes, you’ll get better photos and video out of them.
If you’re one of the few Luddites like me who have decided you’re happier without a computer in your pocket, your feelings on the Life Camera will likely depend on your requirements and tolerance for its lofi vibe. The image quality can’t stand up to a real point-and-shoot camera. On the other hand, a point-and-shoot will run you triple the price and 10 times the weight of the Life Camera, and if you’re nostalgic for the days when a photo album was something that sat on your bookshelf instead of your Facebook profile, you may not mind the look. In the future, I’ll pack my smartphone or a real camera for work trips and life-list destinations; for casual overnights and local days on trail, I may slip this keychain into my pocket instead.
The post I Took a $30 Keychain Camera Hiking to See If It Could Replace My Smartphone Camera appeared first on Backpacker.