I’m a long-time small phone Android user. But after the Pixel 5, I have not been able to find a suitable small Android replacement. The Pixel 6 is gigantic, and the Pixel 7 looks like it is also destined to be huge. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve resorted to using an iPhone Mini, biding my time and hoping desperately that some Android OEM would step up.
But it’s increasingly clear that a small premium phone is not on the roadmap. So I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. My goal with https://smallandroidphone.com is to rally other fans of small phones together and put pressure on Google/Samsung/Anyone to consider making a small phone.
I have a very specific set of skills and industry connections that I have acquired over a long career in the hardware business (my first startup was Pebble). I will put them to use in our shared quest to get the perfect small Android phone. If no one else builds one, and enough people sign up...maybe I will be forced to make it myself.
If you want a small premium Android phone, this may be your last chance (ever?) to help bring back the phone category that we love.
The Pixel 5 was just right IMO. I upgraded to a Pixel 6 after the fingerprint sensor had problems. The first thing I noticed was it was too big. I liked the size of the five much better.
Hear hear! I hope your gadget guy dreams come to fruition again and you sell 10 million! I only am chiming in to say a premium phone should be water resistant!
Similar user, and I have no idea if there will be anything left to buy after the Pixel 4a. I expect the 4a will be good enough for another 3 years at-least, if there are no accidents.
Hopefully by then there is something available which continues the form factor. 4a has been the perfect successor to the Nexus 4, it's a little taller but other than that has practically the same footprint.
With the 6a moving in a different direction (eg: removing the headphone jack) I'm just hoping someone else comes along as a spiritual successor for the Pixel Xa-series.
I am also planning to move from a 4a, and at this point it would be either a Sharp R7 (probably not available internationally though) or a Sony Xperia 10 IV.
The Sony seems to be the best alternative though I have no idea of the software quality.
Band support seems to be better, though I’m not sure which band would work in the US. Also they haven’t announced the non carrier bundled model yet, so I’m stil waiting as well to see how it pans out.
I've been burnt by Sony. Back in the first generation of the compact flagship. A great phone in all aspects... Until it was dropped. A tiny crack in the corner of the screen, you wouldn't notice without looking for it. Unfortunately engineering choices by Sony folk meant that any crack anywhere disabled the digitizer (i.e. the touchscreen loses the touch part). Such a bummer.
I have an Xperia 10 II (or something like that, the slimmest Android device I could find back in early 2021). The back cover is cracked all over, to the point I sometimes get cuts on my fingers. Two of the corners have dents.
The back camera that takes the actual photo is several degrees off (like 10 or 15°) from whatever is used for the preview. Works perfectly in all the other ways. Probably isn't waterproof any more, but I never needed that before, either.
Zenfone 8 - 148 x 68.5 x 8.9 mm (could be higher thanks to narrower body)
Xiaomi 12X - 152.7 x 69.9 x 8.2 mm
Samsung S21 - 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
Sony doesn't produce phones, but remote controls. Their software is nice clean, but their camera is pretty bad, might as well buy Zenfone 8 if you don't mind camera.
>Sony doesn't produce phones, but remote controls. Their software is nice clean, but their camera is pretty bad, might as well buy Zenfone 8 if you don't mind camera.
I imagine few who have used one would ever be able to say this with a straight face. I never met an iPhone user who believed me when I told them all the photos I was showing them were taken with an Xperia XZc (1 and 2, respectively) and that's with every single one of them. There may be half a dozen compact smartphones that really compare to the XZ2c. Sony just gave up on them because the herd loves their phablets so much.
I am also a current owner of the Zenphone 8 and its camera is also decent. If it's really important that you be able to snap the best photos possible, though, they've been developing these discrete camera things for over a century (and the best of them will likely continue to outperform any general purpose device for the foreseeable future).
Snag up a lightly used Pixel 5 while you can. You get 5G and it is basically the same form factor, just a bit better all around. (I've had both and the Pixel5 is a step up for sure)
5G is completely useless in The Netherlands for the time being (until at least end 2023). You can safely ignore it if you're from NL. In other countries, how useful it is going to be depends on your use-case. For example, German autobahn has good 5G coverage.
I like the form factor of mine. Only thing I don't like with it is the battery time, which is shorter than I'd have preferred. But I bought it almost a year ago now, there might be a new model coming that fixes that.
I was about to buy exactly this after reading reviews, wanting a compact phone, and my Note8 dying.
But for a few different reasons I ended up just getting my wife an S22 (non plus) and then inherited her S20 (non plus), which has a very similar form factor.
Definitely felt the OPs frustration in looking for compact Android phones. They just plain don't exist.
I've been very happy with mine. As another user mentioned, the main issue with it is the battery life isn't as good as some other Android phones, but it's good enough that as long as I charge it daily I rarely have to worry about it. Though I do really wish it had wireless charging.
Another Pixel 4a user here. I haven't found a single compelling reason to move to another phone, and will drive this one into the ground... Hopefully there's a suitable replacement once it's dead, otherwise I'll just buy another 4a
Yeah, I've been using the 4a for about a year now, it is pretty sweet. It's the phone I wanted after the Nexus 5. (but with wireless charging). The size is great and it's light. I hate heavy phones.
I faced a similar problem when I didn’t find a sanely sized flagship non-bloated (though that’s essentially an oxymoron in Android world including the Pixels) Android phone sometimes back and I decided to vote with my wallet and I bought the first iPhone SE, then 7, and now 12 Mini. I am an Android developer and the way the OS is designed (UX and privacy wise; even the stock one) I don’t really see myself moving back to Android anytime soon but I wish there was a a flagship normal sized phone.
I dislike Apple for a lot of things but in this duopoly the size of a phone is such a fundamental characteristic that you’re out of options anyway.
I think most of the people are “swiper users” — the “content consumers” — so they want big phones and OEMs are simply making what the near 100% majority (yup!) wants.
Growing up I was told the major advantage of capitalism is that you get a diversity of offerings. This seems less and less true as time goes on, but maybe it was always an illusion.
It is only true when entry barriers to the market are low. Capitalism will give you a diversity of toasters or beer. Complex tech devices like phones have higher barriers, you can't just hack up a phone in a team of 5 people. Besides, economy of scale makes niche products more expensive.
The pixel 4a will be good for another 3 years? What kind of apps are you using? I'm still using a Samsung S7 and don't plan to replace it until it explodes or turns into dust. Then again I don't play games, but I do use it extensively to write/browse/chat. It's somewhat sluggish, but who cares? This idea that we need perfect loading times and constant high-tech phones is such a spoiled mindset.
> It's somewhat sluggish, but who cares? This idea that we need perfect loading times and constant high-tech phones is such a spoiled mindset.
It is, however, probably not a great idea to use a device that hasn't had a security update for several years.
Even if you were using a custom ROM and trusted that it was correctly patched (which is a big if) then there's hardware exploits on the Snapdragon 820, and I imagine there are probably similar on the Exynos 8890. Some of these can't be mitigated by software.
I also got an s10e because iirc it was the only smallish Android phone with ok specs and ok IP rating (also I avoided Chinese brands—though Samsung isn't necessarily everyone's choice either). Very comfortable format!
I've gotten the s10e just last month because it's the top phone that can still run linux on dex (which is a disappointment, but that's a topic for another day), and doesn't have those stupid Samsung edge displays (s10+ 12GB RAM edition).
I'm not sure those other phones are any better in terms of running linux (termux) and those non-samsung ones don't even have dex so I don't even know what the high specs are for.
S22 should be good once it's no longer the latest phone and you can grab at a discount, and maybe Android 13 with KVM is out by then.
One of the reasons I want a small phone is because I already have other devices with a larger screen: computer, laptop and tablet.
That's why I want it to be cheap, I have already spent a lot on different devices and for the little use I give it I want it to be cheap and small.
Of course. But phone manufacturers don't want this. They don't want you using those other devices. And they have the power, so you will submit to their decisions.
I'd love a small primary phone with good battery life for general use (SMS/IM, and (shock!) making/taking calls). Relatively low resolution screen would not be a problem at all.
But I, like most people I expect, also use my phone for many other uses some of which make good use of a larger screen at higher resolution: in-car GPS and while running/walking out on the trails, web browsing and social media stuff that would not be pleasant on smaller screens, occasionally video. The better screen necessitates a bigger battery too, increasing the weight and size a bit more.
I'm not sure there is a solution for that, other than perhaps carrying two devices around. Most people would not be happy with that solution and tethering the bigger device to the smaller ones (so they share internet connectivity instead of both needing SIMs & paid accounts) will reduce the battery life of the small device noticeably (running the 4G/5G and WiFi radios constantly being quite a drain I find, when tethering a laptop to my main current phone).
For a lot of people who would want the smaller phone, there is a secondary need for which they want the larger one too, and putting up with a big device for everything is likely to be the preferable “compromise” compared to carrying two devices.
I've considered the two device approach, but the only really small phones (significantly smaller than my current main device) I found were cheap Chinese imports and one of the first corners cut on those is using a cheap battery that won't last long on active use. Battery life is why my current phone is large than the previous one (which was already larger than I'd prefer often) as it can last a goodly while in active use (GPS and screen on).
tl;cbatr: I suppose the point of this directionless rambling, is that I think the market for a smaller device, people who would actually buy one rather than just those who think it is something that should exist, is smaller than you hope.
This is where I am. Love the idea of a small phone like the android Palm Phone, and almost bought one. But my iPhone 13 Pro Max is basically so big I use it in place of my laptop for many, many things. So it basically replaces my dslr because of the camera quality and my laptop unless I’m writing software. Though I would love a small phone, I didn’t buy the Palm which would have been perfect for when I’m running or something, so I’m not sure I would buy this, even though I want it to exist.
Palm phone fwiw also got discontinued for lack of interest as far as I know.
Palm phone was expensive with garbage specs. But I suppose I was never in the market for it; I wanted a phone that was good enough to be my only phone.
The specs are indeed garbage, but I've been using it as my daily driver for over a year and I really don't want to change to anything else since the form factor and weight are just so nice for when I'm out of the house. For reading the news at home or similar stuff, I do use an old Pixel 3a though.
> in-car GPS and while running/walking out on the trails, web browsing and social media stuff that would not be pleasant on smaller screens, occasionally video
I think the last time I considered screen size a limiting factor for these activities was when the flagship phones had 4.5" screens or so. We've gone well beyond what's needed for me to find the screen large enough for regular activities, and well into the realm where I find using my phone with one hand to be uncomfortable.
Size isn't the reason I went with the larger phone last time I upgraded - it was the longer active (rather than standby) battery life. I can be a fair distance from any source of power for a goodly time and not worry about it shutting down for that reason. Even smaller devices (of those easily available at the time) showed less endurance in independent tests, due to having the smaller battery in their smaller form and/or less advanced chipsets, the exception being one with a lower resolution screen but that was a compromise point too.
> I'm not sure there is a solution for that, other than perhaps carrying two devices around. Most people would not be happy with that solution and tethering the bigger device to the smaller ones (so they share internet connectivity instead of both needing SIMs & paid accounts)
People do that all of the time and gladly pay the extra $10 for a smaller “phone” - the cellular Apple Watch.
I will leave my phone in a heartbeat when I’m going to the gym, the pool, or anywhere else where a large phone isn’t convenient and I still want to be able to keep in touch with people
I would think if you were running that you would prefer a smaller screen, having to stick a gigantic slab in my pocket whenever I transition from my walk to my jog constantly reminds me that I've got a brick flopping around in my shorts.
I never had a problem using a GPS on a small iPhone hooked up to a magnet on my dash in my car before, I can't imagine an extra inch and a half of real estate making that much of a difference.
> I would think if you were running that you would prefer a smaller screen
On of the reasons I'd like a smaller device, though there is the already stated compromises around smaller battery too, and it being a general use device. If I had a small device with excellent battery life I could carry that normally and tether a larger device, in my backpack when not in such use, for mapping and other when needed (I'm not talking nipping out for 10K here, sometimes this is full- or multi-day walking-or-faster events).
> having to stick a gigantic slab in my pocket … reminds me that I've got a brick flopping around in my shorts.
While the perfect phone doesn't exist, I have found the holy grail of shorts: big enough pockets that the slab fits, but tight enough and small enough that it doesn't jiggle noticeably, but not tight to me such that is exacerbates sweat in that patch. Also, the phone for nav on long routes is tertiary, I have breadcrumb trail on my wrist and a printed map (on rip- & water-resistant paper), so if I'm going far enough to require a bag for water/foot/1st-aid/other then there is room for the slab in there too and it isn't too out of reach.
Curious how would you solve the battery issue, since in your spec you mention 4Hrs of Screen On Time (SoT), and it would be a 5G phone (battery drainer)?
iPhone Mini with its H/W & S/W integration barely manages 4Hrs of SoT. An 'Android Mini' phone with its mini batteries, how can it match upto iPhone Mini? And mind you, low sale of iPhone Mini is also due to the 'battery/range anxiety' that its users have.
Upon that any Mini form factor needs to be even less thinner, as visual perception of thickness is inversely proportional to a form's face/back surface area. So for this mini phone to be reasonably attractive (not chunky) it needs to have a very slim profile; which translate to small battery.
I get that tastes vary and some people apparently don't mind the hole punch in the display, but I'm curious why you list its presence as a hard requirement. It seems like it would make the display unnecessarily harder to source.
I just had to throw away my Pebble Time ~1 month ago. It was the best watch I could have asked for but I got some ocean water in it and it wouldn't dry out this time :( I am also using an Moto G7 Play android phone from like 2018 because it's the only small phone I could find for a reasonable price. I would love to see you make something like this!
I want to add another comment here supporting the fact that the camera is probably the main device feature I care about, and why I end up with a phone fancier and bigger than I’d like, and maybe second most important factor is battery life.
Yes, I'm as frustrated as you are. I want a no-compromise 4" Android phone, comfortably usable with one hand. For me, the phone is a communication device for the outside, that's it. I hardly use it at home except for calls. My primary device is my laptop. I have exactly zero use cases that would benefit from a large screen, yet all of my use cases would benefit from being able to fully use it one-handed. I don't watch any kind of video on my phone because it's a torture either way, and I'm okay with smaller fonts to make more things fit on a smaller screen.
It's gotten so bad I contemplated porting Android to the iPhone SE. Not the complete OS, just the userspace, enough to run SystemUI and apps.
Except: a headphone jack is a hard requirement. If a phone has no headphone jack, it could as well not exist for me.
Very much the same situation for me. I'm especially interested in why Eric doesn't mention the headphone jack -- does he simply think it isn't a noteworthy feature, and assume the phone WILL have the jack? Or does he assume that bluetooth is the future and only silly luddites like us care about the jack?
I hope Eric eases up on the weirdly specific requirements, like dual rear cameras, symmetrical bezels, and a punchout front camera, and refocuses on features that make or break the phone to end users.
I agree that the requirements should be pared down to the absolute least common denominator, but disagree that the headphone jack belongs in that category. You (and GP) surely have to recognize that at this point requiring a headphone jack is also a niche request.
No. This software-controlled madness susceptible to interference from microwaves can't possibly be a replacement for just plugging things in. It's literally a Rube Goldberg machine for sending an audio signal between two devices that are a meter apart.
Uhhhh no. Most phones lack headphone jacks these days, so of course the ones that still have them would sell "worse". The same can be said about screen sizes, there are no new phones smaller than 5" "because no one buys them". Of course no one buys something that no one sells.
The best-selling mid-range phone in the world was the Samsung A51 if I'm not mistaken. I have one and it has a headphone jack. It's only the highest-end phones and tablets that don't have it.
The fact that the lack of a headphone jack was normalized by Apple with the release of an iPhone 7 doesn't mean it's any less of a nonsensical idea. Unlike storage media, wireless can't supersede wired simply because each of these options has its own strengths and weaknesses and whether one is better than the other is highly subjective.
Everyone I know gets annoyed from time to time that their modern phones lack the jack.
A lot of people are willing to go without it because practically nobody makes smartphones with the jack any more. But given the choice of a phone with, say, 2% less battery and a jack vs. a phone with a slightly bigger battery and slightly better waterproofing... I'm pretty confident what more users would choose.
I'd love a microSD card slot as well. I suspect, though, that it's less popular a feature than the headphone jack. Until 2016, almost every single smartphone had a headphone jack. Maybe 50% of phones at best had microSD card slots.
That being said... the Xperia compact series is all the proof you need that a small phone can have it all. Good battery life, flagship camera (though understandably you won't have as many sensors as a giant phone), a headphone jack, a microSD card, good battery life, waterproofing, a fingerprint sensor...
It's such a shame that people continually insist that technology we HAD in 2012-2016 is impossible today. All I want is an Xperia Z3 Compact with modern bands and software support.
Hey! I got the Z3 Compact as well. Besides the medicore camera, it was a great device! Too bad mine died with some crappy Google app update (constant reboot loop). Happened on my Shield Tablet as well...
Because I own nice headphones that I like to listen with, I like that they never run out, I like that I can plug them between my phone and my computer as I please instead of praying to the fickle bluetooth gods that they will sync.
It's not that I have never owned wireless headphones, in fact I am literally forced against my will to own and use them and am wearing them as I type. They have some convenience, but adding a headphone jack doesn't mean not being able to use bluetooth headphones - I should just be able to use both.
Yes, there are ways to extract signal from almost anything.
Eavesdropping on either the output of the headphones or the audio data before it leaves the computer/phone is the same for wired vs Bluetooth. The latter seems to be the mode used in the (pretty coo) hack you posted - it's software attacking the Realtek chip, which must be driven by the wire, so exploiting the quasi-equivalence/reversability of speakers/microphones and the back signal from the speaker diaphragms.
This still requires access to get malware onto the device itself, and I'm more considering 'drive-by' or remote attacks in my comment.
To do this against a ~1m wire with millivolt signals without putting a clamp around the wire seems pretty tough in contrast to cracking a signal that is explicitly broadcast with not great security. Not only that, while eavesdropping the signals on the headphone wires will yield only a conversation in the room, which can be much more easily gathered directly, cracking a Bluetooth 2-way comms channel will yield much greater access to the device.
For most of us, neither is a concern, but it certainly is for people who do have real security needs, e.g., I've read that the current VPOTUS specifically uses wired headphones for this reason. Many people who also work with Classified information, Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), or just with business security issues have the same need. Failing to produce a device with this capability is a failure to address a key and leading market.
1. I already have nice earphones, I don't want to spend another $200-$250 for no reason (the going price of most wireless earbuds I've been interested in)
2. Way lower latency than bluetooth.
3. I have too many things to charge as it is. The reduced anxiety of having 1 less device to charge is worth something to me. I know USB-C to 3.5mm dongles exist, but a headphone jack is still better.
4. I oppose the idea of companies artificially taking out basic hardware features (that we've always had for 10+ years) just so they can force more disposable consumer goods to their users year after year.
>>These days there are very good wireless earbuds.
Yes, and now I ended up in an idiotic situation where I have to have a pair for every device I own, because switching bluetooth connections is an unbelivable pain in the ass. No such problems with wired - you only need one pair, you plug them in, they work, end of story.
Not to mention issues like audio sync, which is just broken as hell. As an example, using top of the line headphones(sony MX4s) + a top of the line phone(Galaxy S21), audio isn't in sync with anything other than youtube. Playing games? Enjoy hearing your shots 1s after you fire them. And using them with windows? Now everything is slightly out of sync, because windows is a flaming pile of garbage when it comes to bluetooth audio.
Just to get the same audio quality in BT earbuds are going to set you (me) back 10x more compared to wired ones. And then what all the sibling comments said.
The USB-C-to-3.5mm dongles are bothersome, but they're not that bad. You buy one for each headphone you use, and expect to replace each of them once or twice a year. It sucks, but it has stopped the headphone jack being a /hard requirement/ and instead a nice-to-have.
I have a Pixel 4a, and I'm in agreement with you. I'm thinking about jumping to an iPhone Mini, however, even Apple doesn't seem to be making a new version of that....
i dunno what makes you think that. the iphone 13 mini was released alongside the other iphone 13's and is the latest gen. all signs point to apple releasing a mini version of the next iphone, too.
Yeah, I'm 100% switching to Apple on my next upgrade, probably the mini, but it's screen may be a tad too small. Either way, I've been with Android since the start, but I'm over it.
They depreciate so fast.
My Pixel 3 is just a bit bigger then the iPhone 13 Mini... works great with Lineage OS... might have to change the battery in a year though (not looking forward to it).
I just replaced the battery on my pixel 3. I also replaced the USB C port, because it was cheap and the phone was open. It's pretty simple to do, just tedious. I would recommend buying a replacement back as well so you don't have to worry about keeping the glass intact.
I would love a smaller phone then the pixel 3 but I'll stick with this for now, it's my absolute max size.
No not waterproof, but I didn't try very hard. I would sort of prefer the phone to be easier to open. I used t-7000 glue which seemed really good, the main spot I feel like is not waterproof is where the finger print reader attaches to the back panel, and the camera lense cover.
Looks like it's less then 5 bucks. I bought everything from injuredgadgets. I'm sure there are other good places as well. Can't really review the battery, it's only been a couple days, but so far it's good.
Why only aim for 4 hours of screen on time? I understand the battery will be smaller too but so is the screen. I'd hope to see a bit more. Also, remember that most people won't care about thickness so much especially if it's rugged enough to not need a case.
But anyway good luck with the project! I backed the first Pebble and I'll probably use Beeper once it's fully available. You have a history of delivering on your promises. I just want to wait a bit to see how this one turns out in detail.
Thank you for taking initiative on this! As a 5'5" woman with small hands, I haven't had an android phone that I could use with one-hand since my Nexus 5 (which I used for 5 years straight). The current android flagships are unwieldy even with two-hands for me, and it's been just a quality of living downgrade ever since my Nexus 5 broke. I'm not into apple products myself, but I know many other women swear by the iphone mini since it's the only phone that fits their hands.
I used a friend's once and it seemed fine! Taller height is generally more manageable. It's the lack of one-handed keyboard usability that irritates me the most with modern android phones, and that's more of a width thing.
I'm a fairly large person (185 cm and decent sized hands), but I prefer the mini, and in my Android days used the Xperia mini. I don't particularly want a large phone on a day-to-day basis.
Unfortunately it seems that it's a niche that doesn't generate enough revenue to get broader support.
I got the feeling, that niche markets could be lucrative if the middle man (retail) is left out. The internet is a very powerful tool in this regard. It brings together customers from all over the world.
I actually think the loss of retailers is part of the problem: without places to go and touch and play with things, we've become increasingly beholden to reviewers and shrill opinion factories to try and evaluate things. Niches, especially niches that rely on non-spec driven evaluation, wither and die.
5% of people who buy an iPhone think that the mini is a good choice, but literally every review or discussion of it is positively hysterical about battery life. If you haven't picked one up and handled it, you'd think that it offered no merit and was going to shut down 2 hours into the day.
A recent discussion on this at my work was centred around the notion that large phones don't generally fit in women's clothes pockets (when they have pockets), as the pockets tend to be smaller. There seems to be an inherent sexism in phone design (and clothing design, and many other things).
That is very culture dependent, I think. I don’t know a single woman who usually carries a purse! (I live in Norway. And maybe my acquaintances are unusual. But still.)
I've been mostly wearing men's pants for the past few years to get past the pocket problem (skinny leg men's pants fit me pretty well and still have OK pockets). I'm probably in the minority though, most women just carry a pocketbook.
I'm a tall man with large hands and my S10 is uncomfortable. Just ordered an iPhone 13 mini after finding out that the Pixel 6a, my last hope for a small Android phone, will be big. This will be my first iOS phone despite 10+ years on Android. The situation is idiotic.
I have an iphone SE 2016 because I too felt that new Androids were too big, switched in 2019. If too many people are upset at the price maybe you could have an Android Mini-a like the Pixel line.
I had the first Pebble and have fond memories. I have high hopes for this!!!! I also love hardware but I never made it stick for work. I was one of the first engineers at Mesur.io, but things didn't work out.
My other thought would be to make this highly configurable; there is a large cohort of HN crowd who also want an un-Googled Android phone, myself included. There are no un-Googled small android phones, however with Project Treble many of them can run GSIs such as this most popular one https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/releases . Of course Lineage OS deserves a mention, maybe you could ship with that, build on what the community already offers.
The Unihertz line of phones deserves mention, but also scorn; they do NOT support their old hardware at all. The Jelly had 1 update to Android 8.1 and was left for dead. Additionally the system updater software included in the stock ROM was spyware. So unfortunately they were written off in my book.
Finally, I would like to see band 71 LTE availability for T-Mobile in the US. It really makes a big difference in the sticks. Unihertz does not support that, and for that reason I am sticking with my iPhone SE 2016 for the moment (until I find a small Android phone....)
With regards to Unihertz, I'll add on top of what you said, that they are hiding behind ""crowdfunding"" to give non-existent customer support, while devices have already passed Google certifications months ahead (so my guess is that the device is actually already produced when they start the crowdfunding). In my case, the smartphone I ordered never arrived, and I never got any compensation for it, even though
However, hardware-wise, they aren't too bad, so once you managed to receive it, and you flashed a GSI on it, it's a rather acceptable experience. I know someone daily-driving a GSI (I think it's ProtonAOSP?) on Unihertz Jelly 2, and they are happy with it.
In my opinion, Unihertz small phones are fun, but /too/ small. As the article says, target would be 5-5.5" borderless, 4.5" in Jelly2's format, and I couldn't find any model that match. Closest is Xiaomi Qin 2 Pro (I have it, the form factor is really awesome), but it is too thin and thus its battery is abysmal. (If anyone is interested in Xiaomi Qin 2 Pro, yes it can run GSI just fine, but it requires a bit of work - feel free to send me an email for help)
I've never owned a better phone than the Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G because it's substantially thinner and lighter than any other phone of that size. A smaller screen size may be nice but I've realised how much more I really care about the phone being thin and light. I don't even notice it in my back pocket. I'm now allergic to picking up the new heavy iPhones.
If the smaller screen wouldn't make the phone even thinner I probably wouldn't care enough to switch.
Thank you for working on this! I want to be honest, though, and say I think you're missing what the majority of users on this forum want in a small phone.
> Sub 6" display, matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini
No, bad. What most of us want are the particular set of trade-offs made by phones around 2015. Design wise, that means that you've got to have another hole in the bezel, because there's going to be an earphone jack. That's apparently anathema for modern phones, but probably 90+% of us want it. Again, that's Hacker News specific. I haven't polled the market in general. I just know that I (and many others) won't consider buying your phone unless it has a jack.
Likewise, I have not much interest in a phone with a hole punched in the screen (?!) for a camera or an ugly "notch". I realize this is more controversial, but I don't know the last time I even used a front camera. I think it's more in keeping with the ideal 2015 design to make the bezel just large enough to contain a camera, speakers, light sensor, flash/LED, etc. I would reluctantly buy a phone with a camera hole if it was otherwise acceptable and there was no ideal option on the market.
I'd prefer if the back were completely flat as well, with no camera bump. That's totally just my aesthetic preference though, I don't know how others feel. I think it should be possible to achieve this if we're going back to not worshiping thinness, and making the small phone thicker for the sake of battery life.
I'd also prefer a 16x9 display to whatever Apple is doing now. So much web video is still 16x9.
> Design wise, that means that you've got to have another hole in the bezel, because there's going to be an earphone jack. That's apparently anathema for modern phones, but probably 90+% of us want it. Again, that's Hacker News specific. I haven't polled the market in general. I just know that I (and many others) won't consider buying your phone unless it has a jack.
Your jump from "I want" to "90+% of us want" is an egregious failure in reasoning. You say that you haven't polled the greater market, but you also haven't even polled HN.
That's fair. On the other hand, if there's a single issue with modern phones that gets HN users raging more than their size, it's the lack of a headphone jack. I don't think I've seen a single issue that's been more complained about. The dominant narrative on HN seems to be that even if one doesn't use headphones personally, the removal of the jack served no purpose other than to pad the pockets of Apple. (Someone even managed to modify their iPhone to add an internal jack without breaking it, so it was definitely possible for Apple to do so without compromises.)
This is a bias in what you notice, not what people care about. Some people care strongly about headphone jacks, but until you have data indicating that some==most, you shouldn't let that feeling turn into a population-based argument.
That's entirely possible, but this whole thread is based on exactly the same perception! The claim, possibly false, is that a sizable portion of HN users want small phones. That could be just visibility bias as well!
My comment is asserting that if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias, then it's also good to assume that the narrative around a headphone jack is not just sampling bias. That means we have to believe that a large percentage of users looking for a small phone are also looking for a headphone jack - basically, what I called a "2015" design.
> The claim, possibly false, is that a sizable portion of HN users want small phones. That could be just visibility bias as well!
All you need to do is look at iPhone sales metrics. The iPhone 12 mini and SE2 collectively were 10+% of iPhone sales in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021. 10% of iPhone sales is 24 million phones per year.
> if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias
_We_ aren't. You shouldn't be assuming anything about some supposed narrative on HN at all, and you definitely shouldn't trust your own perceptions of such a narrative when you've already shown that you mentally translate "I and also I saw some comments some times" into "90+% of everyone here".
Such a narrative not only doesn't really exist, even if it did exist it still wouldn't matter, because, again, we have sales numbers for small iPhones that prove that people buy tens of millions of them annually when available.
> you mentally translate "I and also I saw some comments some times" into "90+% of everyone here"
First of all I said 90% of people here who are interested in a small Android phone, not 90% of everyone here.
Second, I feel you're trying to make me feel like I've gone insane and can't trust my own eyes by pretending that threads about the lack of a headphone jack don't routinely make the front page here [1] [2] [3] and that comments about the lack of a headphone jack don't routinely become the highest voted comments in any thread related to phones.
I don't think your point about iPhone sales holds any water, because you could just as easily show that people buy phones that have headphone jacks. The 12 mini is a smaller phone than the 12, so you could argue that some people who don't care about the size of their phone might be preferentially buying the mini! There's no way to make an airtight argument for either a headphone jack or a small phone as someone arguing on a forum, but I believe there are a lot of people who want both.
Moreover, my argument is that the removal of the jack was not done for any engineering reason, but for profit and aesthetics. Even if you are right that 50% of people would use a headphone jack instead of 90%, that's still a perfectly legitimate reason to include one.
No bad. I don't want those iritating headphone wires. Also a phone that doesn't mind being dropped in water, so no headphone jack please. Notch is not really an issue, front facing camera is useful for video-calls. And i don't have a camera bump, that's solved by the case. Also, no idea what i'd do with memory cards, there's plenty memory in the my phone.
The iphone 13 mini works well for me. No idea if this represents anybody elso on HN...
> Also a phone that doesn't mind being dropped in water, so no headphone jack please.
People have somehow managed to forget this, but phones have been waterproof since ... basically forever without forgoing a headphone jack. I could link probably half the phones made between 2012-2017, but this phone is actually linked by the site itself: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/16/9549247/sony-xperia-z5-r...
Honestly, I'm not sure what the issue is supposed to be here. I've literally never, in 12 years of owning a smartphone, dropped it in water. I have no clue how that's even supposed to happen short of it falling into a river.
Since this is a small phone, I suspect most people will probably not be using a case that adds significantly to the size. Just a guess on my part though. I can live with a camera bump if I have to, I just think a lot of us miss the candy bar designs of ~2014-2015.
The most common way that a phone gets into water is that a woman has the phone in her pocket and it falls into the toilet. Most women's clothing has extremely terrible pockets that cannot securely hold a modern-size smartphone.
I am typing this from a waterproof phone with a USB C port and headphone jack. Yes, I have put it underwater. There were plenty of waterproof phones with headphone jacks before flagships dropped the port.
please reverse the order you list the phones in your last image... no reason other than it irks me that the lowest phone in the image is listed highest and vice versa
I would buy your phone, but I don't really like the iPhone mini industrial design. The square edges make it a bit hard to hold. I also don't mind if it's a bit larger than iPhone mini. Pixel 3/iPhone 13 size is my limit.
If nobody makes something like this, I'll likely switch to iPhone 14 when it's released.
At the moment it looks as if there will be no iPhone 14 Mini. You don't explicitely mention "Mini" here, but from context it looks as if you mean that. Just a heads up (and the reason why I bought a 13 Mini even though my old phone was still fine).
I bought a Palm Phone as soon as it came out, it is the perfect phone. Basically same size as the old Motorola Razr but even a bit thinner.
I'm very sad they discountinued it. I hope mine lasts forever or that either Palm or someone else fills this market gap for a small phone. If this initiative does it, thank you!
My highest requirement for a phone is that it easily fits into the front pocket of tight jeans so I can't ever even feel that it is there. The Palm Phone meets this requirement, haven't found anything else that does.
I'm curious why you say "After the Pixel 5". Isn't that still pretty current specs wise? I love mine. I too would like to know where I'm moving next, but I'm also quite content with its specs for likely awhile yet.
I’m in the same boat, though I like apple. I’d still go for an android phone if they made something really small though.
However, I think the era of small phones as we know it is over for now. The smallest we have is the Mini, and even that isn’t small.
In fact, I think the next version of the small phone will be flip phones. We already see this with the Samsung fold. I tried one and was pretty impressed, and I feel like this is the likely direction the industry may take.
However, I’m using my current phone for the next five or six years. I’m sure by then, the folding screen tech will improve a lot, and apple may even have their own version out by then.
With each generational increase of display size, The number of times I drop the phone over its lifetime increases proportionally. I've used android phones from 2.8" to 5.7" display as daily drivers over the past decade.
I assume, Many with small hands(palms) do face the issue of dropping phones, So I finding it quite surprising that 'Easily Repairable' wasn't included in neither 'Must have' nor 'Nice to have'.
Repairability is so important to me that, I have stopped buying new smartphones since 2017. My last/current phone has full-metal construction, is easily repairable, has security updates(sans proprietary blobs) via LineageOS and I'm planning to switch to a postmarketOS device from near-same generation for better security(Only bootloader is proprietary).
IMO in the age of Fairphone, there's no excuse for a non easily-repairable phone; Especially one which has community interests in mind. I wish you the best on this endeavor.
I’m not a dwarf, but I do have smaller than average hands and really struggle to type on a phone one handed. I dropped my phone a lot trying to balance it.
Have you come across pop sockets? Small collapsible self-adhesive handles for the back of your phone. They’ve made an absolutely massive usability difference to my phone usage (although I aim for the smallest handset I can get without compromising too much on quality anyway). Total game changer
I tried pop sockets on the phones of my friends, my fingers are too small and stubby that I felt I would drop the phone more by fiddling with it so I didn't use them.
Btw checkout Swiftkey's one-hand mode for typing, If you haven't already.
Welcome, I assumed everyone knows about it here hence I didn't include much details about it[1].
Fairphone, Founded on the principles of ethical consumerism have consistently delivered on their promises which by itself is an extraordinary feat in the world of smartphones (or) consumer electronics in general.
Occasional but common criticisms on their devices from HN include specs not being competitive with flagships and build quality not up to expected levels(But newer devices have got good feedbacks on the build quality).
They are only available in EU + few other countries, If you don't live in their supported countries list then getting their phone might not be advisable as getting the parts easily for repair is their main USP(Besides telecom radio support).
So if you use phone as a utility and not as sustenance then Fairphone is a good choice if you can get it, Besides money goes to a socially-invested business.
I want headphone jack and SD card compatibility back, so I can store my audio library somewhere else (more reliable and less costly) other than the cloud, but phone makers are bent on disappointing customers and customers keep buying whatever junk they make and label as overpriced flagship devices.
Samsung S7 user here. Perfect phone. Good looking (silver one is awesome), no notches, great camera, good battery.... and perfect size. It's hard to accept for companies that they already achieved a great result, and only minor improvements need to be added. Maybe because if they would keep selling S7a, S7b, etc people wouldnt be so convinced to buy new ones so they need to make changes and somehow convince people the many changes are for the better... even if they aren't.
Zenfone 8 - 148 x 68.5 x 8.9 mm (could be higher thanks to narrower body)
Xiaomi 12X - 152.7 x 69.9 x 8.2 mm
Samsung S21 - 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
S22 has almost identical dimensions as Pixel 5, so there is your upgrade. Personally I find all of these overpriced for what I need, I would be perfectly fine with 4A specs with better battery, so can't justify to upgrading to some of these.
If you can make a phone I love as much as my Pebbles, I'll buy nothing else, forever. I guess confirming there's a market for it is the first step.
My phone requirements haven't changed much in the last ten years. I bought one of the first "phablet" phones with a comically oversized 5" screen that got me ribbed by friends ("compensating for something eh mate?") Now 5" is at the bottom of the available size range. I'm a smallish person/manlet and don't need a phone I'm going to drop, but I do need something big enough that I can reliably type on it.
I'll gladly support your endeavor. Thanks for taking the initiative.
edit: fine with me to make the phone thicc so it has a day+ battery life. A little thicker is far easier to hold on to, anyway!
edit2: I did own a Pixel 6 non-XL for about a day. It was large, but the bigger problem was that I found it incredibly topheavy, which made it difficult to hold on to. I swapped for a used 4a 5G, which is a well-balanced midsized device.
I think than some two of the prerequisites are the real problem :
* Great cameras
* Stock Android OS
There are plenty of recent small smartphones with a display under 6". But most of them use Android Go and a not-great camera. I have recently tested one, the Logicom Le Wave, a 60€ phone with a 4" display sold in Europe.
During my test, i have find Android Go 11 very reliable. It's even more easy to avoid using Google applications and to not link the phone to a Google account (by using F-Droid & Aurora Store) than Stock Android. There are also nice features for managing battery usage. That said the two cameras are indeed crap (but i do not take photos with a phone, for this i use a real cameras). My main problem with this phone is that it's also bad for... phoning: I mean than the sound quality is crap too.
I was probably unlucky with my choice, but there are plenty of alternatives for 4" to 6" smartphones. Search for "teenage" or "unbreakable" phones.
If the real objective is to have a light phone, who fit nicely in the pocket, than can be used one-handed and who won't fall out of the pocket while bicycling, then this sort of phones are perfectly fine. So my question is why the need of a good camera and stock Android ?
(For the main point, i agree with you, smartphones are becoming ridiculously too big)
By the way, I was interested in Beeper but it seems the airtables link to sign up blocks any ip addresses from Hong Kong. I just get a blank page when I try to sign up.
Just bringing it up, I have noticed quite a few sites have blanket bans on HK ips but it's rather frustrating.
From what I've seen, the tiny Palm Phone (from TCL) didn't do very well, but there's still some inventory on Amazon: https://palm.com/pages/product.
There's also the Cyrcle Phone (https://www.cyrclephone.com/) which doesn't seem to be for sale anymore after its Kickstarter and Indie Go Go campaigns.
The Cyrcle Phone doesn't look small at all, just in a different shape. Also from the video shots it looked like the UI wasn't very well adapted to it's screen shape.
The Galaxy S10e is my current phone, and I'm not sure what I will do when it stops receiving security updates. It's basically perfect. It still has an SD card slot. It still has a headphone jack. It has wireless charging. It's reasonably sized. And it had flagship-for-the-time specs (albeit slightly less than the mainline S10 or S10+). Samsung doesn't make anything comparable to this anymore.
The only drawback is that the battery life has gotten worse since I originally bought it. But if I could easily swap that out, I would keep it for another five years.
EDIT: Oh, and the fingerprint scanner on the power button seems to work way more reliably, IMO, than the embedded fingerprint scanners under the touchscreens.
Using the same phone. The glass on the back is a bit broken after I dropped it for like the 100th time, and the battery life is somewhat mediocre, but otherwise it is the best thing I have ever used.
The S22 (standard version) has slightly bigger screen but is quite similar in size, so that is probably what I will use next.
I did exactly what you're describing. I like the S22 but it is a little bigger than my ideal size. My only minor nitpick is with the fingerprint reader being under the screen instead of embedded in the power button (which I loved about the s10e since holding it naturally would unlock the screen). Samsung should just make something like an S22e or 23e.
If you have a bit of patience, install LineageOS. Samsung phones have a big following in this domain - as of today (May/2022), even the Galaxy S3 (Neo) is supported (!).
I'm not saying it's trivial (it's not hard, but has a large enough amount of small actions to execute), but it's definitely worth doubling (or more) the phone duration.
The FamousProducer™ of my phone supported it for 3 years. This is terrible. LineageOS allows me to use it now - over 3 years after the end of support. Screw FamousProducer™.
IIRC, LineageOS support for US Samsung devices with Snapdragon CPUs has always been very limited. Rooting them is difficult, if not impossible, and I seem to remember that doing so blows some kind of fuse in the device itself which then irreparably caps the battery on the device to like 80%.
Given that the S10e's battery life is already waning, I'm not sure I want to do that. But yes! If there were a safe way to do so, I would gladly run LOS on the phone for ten years.
Why be so coy about this? Naming and shaming should serve as a warning to those who might buy one expecting long term support, or as a spur to action towards LineageOS for those who many have been or are about to be blindsided by the support window expiring.
You're correct. The reason is not to attribute industry common practices to a specific company, but it makes sense also to expose it :) The producer is Google. I think (not sure) that they support their phones for 3 years.
The previous security update window guarantee for Pixels from Google was 3 years. With the 6 series (I believe they confirmed this includes the 6a) they extended that to 5 years.
My real problem isn't the previous 3 year window but that it counts from the first day they sell it, not the last. I bought my current phone, a Pixel 3a, late in its cycle for cheaper, early in 2020. It's now basically at the end of its updates because the guarantee counts 3 years starting from the release date in mid-2019, not from when I bought it.
5 years is obviously preferable but I'd like them to have also shifted it to be based on when they stop selling them new.
Using a refurbished Galaxy S7. It works just fine, is small enough and has a physical home button which I love.
We don't need new phones.
Please stop buying new phones, buy refurbished ones and prioritize easy to repair friendly hardware.
The issue with refurbished ones is guaranteeing quality.
If you buy from Amazon Renewed, for example, you have no idea exactly what you'll get. You could get a pristine unit without a scratch on it with a battery that has barely 10 cycles, or you could get a well worn (with plenty of micro scratches and minor nicks) with a battery that's been cycled 500+ times. It's kind of a crap-shoot when it comes to buying refurbished.
As someone who takes pride in keeping my phones absolutely perfect and even micro-scratch free, it's too much of a risk.
I bought mine on backmarket, they act as a middleman. You buy from a repair with a minimum six months guarantee or beyond. If it stops working, you can send it to repair. Batteries are guaranted to be at least 70% original capacity or have been replaced. There are different grades from scratched to pristine. Not sure they operate in your country though.
Getting a former flagship phone for 150 euros with a CPU just as good or equivalent to a new phone of the same price seems worth it to me. Plus it's nice not to have to worry about that expensive thing in your pocket.
I'll see your Galaxy S10e and raise you a Galaxy S7. Just the right size for me and still going strong, in spite of the fact it was second hand already, when I bought it off eBay about 4 or 5 years ago.
I really don't know why people think they need a new phone every year. I've had 2 in the past decade. Both bought cheaply second hand [previous one am HTC One M8] and I got years of use out of each. In fact the One M8 is still working fine, apart from the degraded battery life.
Yeah, I'm still using an S7, similarly purchased second hand. Hardware is great. Have recently installed LightROM on it to get a more up to date Android, and it works really well. I tried the latest LineageOS for a brief spell, and it performed beautifully except that voice calls had the robot-voice issue that plagues Samsung phones (thanks proprietary drivers!)
I've had a very similar experience with my Galaxy S10. I got the battery swapped a few months ago for a very reasonable ₹2000 ($~30) at a Samsung service centre. Now my battery life is back to what it used to be. I'm confident I'll keep using this for at least two more years.
There's absolutely no replacement for this phone right now. Flagship specs, amazing camera, decent battery, SD card, headphone jack, 1440p screen. There's nothing like it.
PS: the in screen fingerprint sensor was quite horrible initially, but updates over the years have made it quite similar to a regular sensor.
Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?
---
I see these meme on tech sites all the time: “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a lot of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity. Aging populations like them because you can use screen zoom features to really blow up that text size without making the effective viewport too small.
And…people just like big stuff. I know that’s simplistic and a little condescending, but then look at SUV and truck sales.
Another under-mentioned reason is that iPhones have more efficient processors that generate less heat, and also need less RAM to perform equivalently.
Whereas, fitting a top-line Snapdragon into a small phone is a challenge. There’s a reason why top-tier phones have copper heatpipes, vapor chambers, and so on. All things no iPhone has or needs.
You could still do a small Android phone, but you might have to abandon the idea of including a Snapdragon 8.
I touch on this on the site. 5% of iPhones sold are minis. That's 10m sold per year! That is more than enough demand to cover the NREs and costs of making a phone.
5% seems quite small and not worth the trouble. It might be worth it if a small phone generated 5% in additional sales, but most people buying a small iPhone would likely buy a normal-sized iPhone if no small version was available rather than making the switch to Android.
The point is that 5% (or 10m phones) does not make sense for Apple to continue to build, but that has no relation to whether it's worth it to another company.
My point is that 5% is probably an irrelevant number because it’s not 5% additional sales. If the mini wasn’t available, many people would get a normal iPhone instead of switch to Android. So the net sales is closer to 0. Apple seems to agree with this sentiment and there will be no mini starting with the iPhone 14: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/14/exclusive-iphone-14-coming-in...
That's why I picked up an iPhone 13 Mini. It's a really great phone and when I need a new phone six years from now, I'm hoping there's something as good to replace it.
Phone sales aren’t driven by switching, and haven’t been for a while, they’re about upgrading. Apple knows this better than anyone.
For example: I upgrade my phone every two years or so, so long as I like the new phones. If I don’t like the new phones, I wait as long as possible.
People that like smaller phones won’t necessarily leave the iPhone if they kill the Mini - they will just keep their current phones for as long as possible. And that can indeed hurt sales, even if Apple doesn’t lose market share.
Is there a world where the iPhone mini is necessary or desirable when the iPhone SE also exists? I don't see a need for both, especially when they run the same processor under the hood.
I use an iPhone SE 2016, which uses the same chassis as the iPhone 5/5s.
I tried an iPhone 6S for a year before I got this phone. Couldn't stand the size. The current SE is the same size as the 6S. I'm basically stuck at a dead-end of phone size.
The current SE is not compact by historical standards. I'm not saying all phones need to be smaller, I just want one decent option.
The iPhone SE is a full-sized phone. It just happens to be obsolete in the marketplace, and the other full-sized phones it competes against have become even fuller sized.
If the iPhone mini is managing to capture all of the "I want a small flagship phone" market, it's worth it. As long as the Mini exists, it's impossible for other manufacturers to try and compete.
Your argument suggests that there are actually 2 smart phone markets. One for iPhones, one for everything else. I think this is a fairly reasonable assumption for the majority of consumers.
Let's assume very few people are switching ecosystems at this point based on form factor. That would mean Apple made a new product to cannibalize 5% of their existing market. No similar product exists in the android ecosystem. It seems reasonable that an android phone maker could get similar market share but have these sales come from a combination of their existing sales and competitors sales.
I know more than a few people who got Iphones only because there were no or too hard to find Android phones in a smaller form factor. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of that 5% would switch back in the no-mini scenario
I half suspect that Apple will be coming back with another small phone a few years down the line and then a cycle will continue where they will always have something like an SE or mini, but it won't ever be flagship level.
I feel like that has been the problem with the Mini. I love mine (which I got because I was fed up with Pixel and Android in general), but I know I only have it because I got in at the right time. My wife bought an iPhone at the wrong time and hers is comically large. She would have happily bought an iPhone Mini if it had been available that year. By the time she needs a new iPhone, it will be another year where the only options are gigantic.
Agreed. I hope the rumors are false and that they'll continue to make the Mini. However, 5% does not mean much if market research proves that those people would buy a regular iPhone anyway if they drop the Mini.
I think there is also some competition with the iPhone SE. Even though the Mini is not intended to be a budget phone, it is 100 Euro cheaper than the non-mini. So, I can imagine a chunk of people would buy it for its lower price if the iPhone SE didn't exist. Even more if you consider that the Mini actually has a larger screen than the SE.
It's as good as guaranteed that the mini won't be returning this year - dummy models of the upcoming line which are used to size cases have made their way to the usual leakers, and even before that the front panels of the line were leaked. No mini, unfortunately :/
That said, Apple does tend to keep their designs for a fair while, so it's possible there will be one next year, or that it will become the new SE at some point.
You won't get one, unfortunately, both because there's no motivation for Apple to make it, and because battery life would be an insurmountable issue, at least with current tech. The battery life in the Mini is already significantly inferior to the other iPhones in the line; Apple's only going to be willing to push that so far before it's an obviously-compromised product and they would just refuse to ship it.
I'd be fine if they made it a biennial release. I don't need to upgrade my phone more than that anyway.
I feel like my plan right now is to hope with the iPhone 14 launch, the 13 mini will continue to be sold with a price drop, and then I'll upgrade my 12 mini to the 13 mini and get the battery improvement. I love the size of this phone and hope I'm never forced back to the gigantic "normal-sized" phones that we've gotten stuck with the past decade.
For one - most of the iPhone Mini sale is because of 'Halo effect', die hard fans who anyway would have bought an iPhone, bought the mini version. An Android phone maker will not have that brand pull or halo effect to establish a new category, so it would be no where near that 10M number.
Second, iPhone or Mac devices are known for hardware and software integration. That translates among other things to good battery life (similar to RAM. Apple never talks about RAM).
iPhone Mini has been weak in battery department [1], one of the factor in its low sale as compared to bigger device. A Mini Android device will have mini batteries, that means it will have no chance in h* to last through the day - the minimum requirement in this day and age.
If you’re a diehard fan why would you buy a subpar phone, and not the latest flagship? Smaller phones imply less usage because some things aren’t as pleasant as on a bigger screen.
I guess I am a diehard fan of only small iPhones, as since 2007 my lineup has been: iPhone 3, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPhone SE, and currently 12 Mini.
As far as I am concerned, the mini IS the flagship. I would never even consider buying one of the larger models, as I consider them to be subpar, unpleasant devices to carry and to use. I'd choose to carry no phone over having to carry a full-sized phone, they have become too large to be considered conveniently portable.
For me, the perfect smart phone would be the same size and shape as a credit card, edge-to-edge screen on all sides, and approximately 3mm thick. And it would run iOS of course.
The mini line up is not “subpar.” There is utility in a smaller form factor that is equal to or greater than the the value of the better specs in a large form factor. If that weren’t true then everyone would be walking around with an iPad instead of an iPhone.
> most of the iPhone Mini sale is because of 'Halo effect', die hard fans who anyway would have bought an iPhone, bought the mini version.
Citation needed? A lot of people love to jump to the conclusion that nobody wants small phones. My personal experience does not align with that conclusion. I'm happy to accept this conclusion if you have some kind of evidence for it, but the linked article just discusses battery life, which was greatly improved in the iPhone 13 Mini anyway.
The numbers on that site are a bit vague and I'm having a hard time making out the chart due to the colours, but they still sold millions of iPhone 13 Minis, right? Plus, you should probably add up the mini + SE as well for "small(-ish) phone demand".
I think you can make a profitable niche selling smaller phones. Most people don't want a 12" laptop either as they consider it too small, but some people do and various companies still make a profit designing and selling them. I don't quite understand why it's so different for phones.
I'm inclined to think that applies more to Americans than people generally. Europeans and Australians can be quite content with smaller vehicles, smaller properties, and quite frankly smaller lifestyles.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk of Germans as environmentally conscious. Car culture is usually one of the first things that comes up when someone talks about Germany.
I have lived in Southern Germany for ~5 years and lived in The Netherlands before and after. Germans most definitely (at least in the south) have bigger cars on average.
I think your comment is a good example of the disconnect in how you and I seem to mean different things when we say environmentally conscious. In my opinion, driving a car every day isn't environmentally conscious, regardless the size of the car. These days, the difference between two modern cars is not that big, they're both still big polluters. You don't need to drive a 5-person car to work alone every day, nor to the store, nor to the gym, but it is what very many people in Germany do. Whether that car is big or small does not make that big of a difference when you compare it to the alternative of taking the public transport, cycling or walking. I understand the alternatives are not as comfortable, but that is a matter of choice — it is a choice to build cities in a way that favors cars over pedestrians and cyclists.
A simple example of what I mean is traffic lights. I've lived in many European countries, including Germany, and travelled a very fair bit in the rest. In Germany, traffic lights are green for cars for a long time and green for pedestrians a very short time (feel free to measure this at any traffic light in your city). In countries where infrastructure is planned around humans, it's the other way around.
Cycling is another example of this. Germany doesn't have "bad weather for cycling". People cycle to work in winter in Helsinki and don't bat an eye. The difference is infrastructure. Helsinki has not only built the roads, lights and the rest around it, but they also ensure it's in good condition. When it snows, bike paths often get cleaned before car roads. It's a matter of choice. I bring up Helsinki because it's easier to compare. Netherlands and the like are so far ahead everyone else in humane cities that the comparisons are hard to make. Helsinki is a good example because their developments are recent and go to show that you can choose to live a different way.
Well, I was talking about reputation explicitly. Buying a small car instead of a big one is generally perceived as environmentally conscious by most. Most international colleagues I deal with, and got my anecdotes from, are from France, Switzerland, Norway and the US. They are frequently amazed by all those little things we do that they consider proof of that. Whether we actually are environmentally friendly in a measurable way is an entirely different topic. :-)
I have lived in Germany for five years and this is absolutely true. Even many students have cars, which was completely surreal/absurd to me, since I didn't have any fellow students in The Netherlands with a car (only bikes). I'd cycle to work every day (22 km for the round trip), I'd regularly get comments from Germans that I was crazy to cycle that distance through all weather.
Watching German politics more closely during those years, I have seen that choices between: is better for car owners, is better for something else, gets decided in favor of is better for car owners 90% of the times. Heck, even some members of the Green Party are very cozy with the car industry (e.g. Kretschmann).
> I'd regularly get comments from Germans that I was crazy to cycle that distance through all weather.
It is a bit unusual outside of the Netherlands and Denmark.
I tried to cycle to work 8km or so and it was fine until I had to cross a slope. And since this slope was etched by the nearby river, it went through the whole city, so there wasn't any way around it.
Took all the fun out of it honestly, especially during heatwaves.
> I'd cycle to work every day (22 km for the round trip), I'd regularly get comments from Germans that I was crazy to cycle that distance through all weather.
The Germans probably don't know that with 2cm of snow, all the other means of transport, including the Amsterdam metro, stop working. So bicycle it is. I loved my 25km (round trip) bike commute when I lived there, it was such a great way to clear my head before/after work.
Right, it's not that we don't want bigger houses, apartments or cars, we just can't justify it in terms of cost.
I'd love to get my wife a bigger car, so she wouldn't be scared of driving in the snow, but just buying it would be three times the price (or more) compared to the small car she's currently driving.
It's nice to have that space for your house, but on the other hand your kids can't go to school by themselves, and neither can you jump on your bike for some shopping and be back in ten minutes.
Bigger houses and more (sometimes mandatory) parking also means everything is further apart and making cars more needed even when going between stores.
I don't think it's as much a culture difference as you think, more like the environment where we use the cars.
I'm from Europe, living in bigger European city, and I have a small car (3-door RAV4). I bought it so I can drive and park easily in the city and go up hills and mountains when I leave the city once a month.
And if I'm honest, that is the best car I could afford. I see lots of rich people with bigger and bigger SUVs cruising in the city in Germany: G wagons, BMWs, Audis, Volkswagen Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes everywhere.
I went on a road trip in the US, rented an SUV that would be huge and impractical here, but there, it actually felt small. The roads were wide, traffic wasn't bad, parking was easy. I loved it.
If I lived in the countryside in Europe where I need to transport stuff for my ranch/farm (and if I could afford it), I'd definitely consider buying a pickup truck.
The same goes for properties. The reason why I lived in a 30sqm apartment with my wife was that is all I could afford while living in the city, close to good job opportunities. I would have been obviously happier if I could have a 300sqm house.
Okay, let's remove the "obviously" from my quote. Everybody is different.
In my case, I don't see why I would be sad over having a bit more place. It would be nice to have a place for an office, a small home gym, bigger kitchen, dining room, terrace with a BBQ, etc.
I'm not saying it would solve every problem in my life, but it would make a couple of things less inconvenient.
It's a three door version, 3860 mm long. It's about as much as the shortest Mini model. It's amongst the shortest cars around here, Renault Twingo, and "smart" cars are shorter, but nothing else comes to my mind that would be significantly shorter than the RAV4.
American here with a Smart Fortwo, but I may be an outlier. Dead simple to park in the city though, and I hear lots of people complaining about parking, so… I don’t know why everyone buys those enormous cars here. :)
China loves the Pro Max - it outsold the Pro there [1], and my understanding (based largely on hearsay, so take it with a grain of salt) is that they generally love large phones over there.
My girlfriend liked the mini, but didn’t get it partially because it doesn’t feature the 3 cameras. As long as the mini is positioned as a down brand phone, even for technical reasons, some of the interested market is excluded
There's just not enough space for all the random features people want in a small form factor phone and keep it thin-ish. The Pro Max camera group alone is 1/5-1/4 of the back real estate on the 12 mini.
One thing I don’t think people appreciate is just how impressively compact the Minis are. Every bit of space is used up. I doubt any Android OEM (with the exception of maybe Samsung) could get make a comparable device.
Unless they used something akin to a laptop webcam, there simply isn’t enough space for a third camera.
What kind of illoyal loser would denounce their wife in public, offer to “trade” her like some property, all over some completely meaningless bullshit cliché complaint about their choices of style?
What kind of illoyal loser would denounce their wife in public, offer to “trade” her like some property, all over some completely meaningless bullshit cliché complaint about their choices of style?
Wow, angry much? I suggest contacting your local mental health crisis hotline before you turn your internet rage into something people actually care about. In the United States, just dial 988.
Failing that, try getting a sense of humor. They're nice.
Give me a break. You know damn well that the GP didn't really want to trade his wife and it was a joke, yet you felt compelled to gallop in here on your steed and bravely proclaim - on a tech message board, in 2022 - that you are against treating human beings as property.
If you thought the joke was distasteful, say it was distasteful. But pretending it was serious and loudly letting us all know you are against trading human beings is some of the lamest virtual signalling I've ever seen.
These "slow iPhone 13 mini" sales are more than all Google Pixel phones sold in a year. Think about that.
I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews and modern American perception. Why is being able to buy niche products somehow not a worthy thing to be desired?
I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews
Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world.
On HN, if you can't serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.
It's why so many people on HN don't understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don't understand artisan anything. They've forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can't grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand.
"X doesn't scale" is HN for "I know nothing about how the world works."
Maybe we could have a market for very high end phones that cost $3000, but I haven't seen anyone try to fill that niche yet. Maybe it isn't there?
Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
That market absolutely exists, and a few people have tried to serve it over the years. Here's an old example, a Samsung phone promoted by Jackie Chan that cost about $3,000 back in 2012:
I'd be very careful about suggesting that failure proves there is no market for something.
Many PC companies failed before Apple succeeded. Apple itself failed to the point of almost being acquired by Sun before succeeding by buying NeXT and shipping some hit products in the form of colourful iMacs and iPods with click-wheels.
The biggest problem with luxury products is that they have almost nothing to do with the product's tangible features and everything to do with whether you can establish a valuable brand. We live in a world where people spend thousands of dollars on fancy numbers that we have a kind of gentleman's agreement signify that they "own" a jpeg anyone can copy.
I suggest that there is absolutely a market for ridiculously priced phones, but the problem is not hand-crafting a phone with rare materials, the problem is creating the collective hallucination that owning such a phone will make other people envy you.
Apple actually sold some solid gold watches. There was a market for a $18,000 Apple Watch. It wasn't something worth sustaining in perpetuity, but there was a market. They also launched ridiculously priced accessories from Hermes, and there is still a market for them almost a decade later.
People will pay large amounts of money for exclusive items, but it takes a particular set of skills to launch something and convince the world it's the must-have accessory of the moment.
I think this is not exactly what GP was talking about. These are normal phones with an expensive marketing gimmick.
The "RED Hydrogen One," by that fancy camera company is closer I think. At least it had some story that could hypothetically have ended with a compelling technological reason for it to exist (RED is supposed to know cameras). Although, it didn't seem to work out either, but with a sample size of 1 it could be a fluke of poor execution.
I'm surprised none of the really consumer-oriented camera companies have broken into smartphones. Camera stuff seems like more of a selling point for smartphones, than phone stuff. But, it seems like they never really want to dive in fully.
Yeah, this came up when I was looking around. I'd call it a case of not diving in fully. Since it is really just a rebrand of a phone from some other company (albeit one for which they provided the optics).
Samsung made some folding phone which were pretty close to $3,000 on release IIRC. Pushing-the-envelope android phones can reach eye watering prices, and early adopters always pay up too. Personally I would rather wait for the 3-4th generation of anything THAT wild as the tech was very much not ready for launch.
Grains of sand getting into the hinge and mandatory factory-installed screen protectors are not things I want to deal with on a purchase that expensive.
The current folding generation launching this year (4th Gen) is likely to be the next big thing, rumors are huge price drop and likely a more polished experience as production is ramping up for more units.
The limitation to making niche phones are the stupid, sclerotic, CARRIERS--not the manufacturers. It's the carrier gatekeeping that prevents niche phones from forming.
We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
Also consider he's specifically appealing to makers of premium phones - you can bet Google and Samsung care a lot about scale. And to the parent's point about the iPhone 13 mini's sales still being more than all Pixels: ok, so then consider the already much smaller Pixel market share and how many people are left at the % of iPhone sales that the mini made up.
I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.
Saying that HN readers (who are quite diverse, btw) "know nothing about how the world works" or "don't understand" things in this context is just lazy thinking.
We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear.
It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?
And it took Panic a decade to release the Playdate and it is still back ordered for over a year. Hardware has to “scale” to get manufacturing capacity and scale economies.
>> I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews
> Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead.
IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.
Much of that can be chalked down to the fact that Apple doesn't have that many models they actively sell, so the models that they do tend to have way more than any individual Android model, and that the mini is the cheapest iPhone in the 13 line. I know a few people who went for the mini because it was marginally cheaper.
I went with the mini because the new SE is fraking bigger with less screen. The mini is just about the limit of what i want to put in my pocket. If they get any bigger, im going watch with cell and leaving these phablets at home.
Do y all have really small pockets or something? For women, I get it, your pants don't come with pockets and that sucks. But for guys? I've had a Samsung Note phone in my pocket since the Note 2, they where the model that invented the phablet moniker... Never had an issue. Do I just make better pant choices than most people?
Actually, in certain situations, yes. My running shorts have pockets that barely fit iPhone mini. Yes, I know there are other accessories that I can buy to fit giant phones in but I rather not.
NRE costs on a phone are easily measured in the $Millions. Your niche has to either (a) have enough volume to dilute those costs; or (b) be willing to pay a lot more per unit to cover them.
It's not a "bad thing" about HN or American perceptions -- it's economic reality: it just isn't cost effective for the big incumbents to pursue, and it's (likely) beyond the scope of a grass-roots, Kickstarter-style effort.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I'm not sure if Pixel are the best example, as they have demand that they don't satisfy.
For example in Spain, the Pixel 6 Pro was only sold for a few days in February, then sold out, then returned a few days ago - so it only seems to start being consistently available now, and it's a 2021 phone. Oh, and only the 128 GB model is sold here. I had to ask an Australian friend to mail a 512 GB one to me!
And at least, they do sell it here. In most countries, you can't even buy it.
Compare to iPhone where you can get every model with every storage capacity consistently, in Spain, and in the overwhelming majority of countries in the world.
I've even seriously considered switching to iPhone for this very reason, by the way.
> These "slow iPhone 13 mini" sales are more than all Google Pixel phones sold in a year. Think about that.
That really doesn't say much. Google has never figured how to sell hardware, nor shown the will to learn. If Google was trying to sabotage the sales of the Pixel line, it could probably not do a better job.
> “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a lot of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity.
My way of dealing with it is two phones. Besides my smartphone, I still use my more than ten-year-old Nokia when I do not want to take the big smartphone with me. Of course, it only has phone, SMS and a clock. But I usually do not need anything else when I go for a walk or meet up with friends. I just want to be reachable in case there is a problem.
Its old battry still lasts quite a long time, and I have it switched off most of the time anyway. So I can go 7+ days without recharging.
Do you still use your phone as a phone? Because I personally stopped using the phone features long ago, and I suspected many are in the same basket. So even for a minimalist/backup device, it would still need to be a "smart" phone, for note taking, calendar sync and what not.
Yes, I am indeed primarily using phone and SMS for mobile communication. I have never been on Facebook or WhatsApp and generally do not like too much distraction. If I am in the mood to socialise with people, I call them, email them or suggest a joint activity, but typically from home. And as I have been working from home office (or camper-van) even pre-COVID, I am prefering my laptop for email, calendar, to-dos, Web-browsing, etc. I think this reduces the need to carry a smart phone around quite a lot, compared to many others.
What could change that would be the availability of a smartphone that turns into a PC/laptop when connected to a docking station. I suspect that Microsoft is pursuing such a plan with the integration of Android into Windows 11. Let's see ...
> Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?
Because it's not Apple selling them and Android smartphone manufacturers operate with much lower margins.
Take Motorola for example, which isn't even one of the 10 largest smartphone manufacturers. They released ~30 different smartphone models in the past year alone, so they apparently make money, even if they don't sell millions of units per model.
Yet none of the models released in the past year has a height shorter than 159mm or a weight lighter than 155g.
I believe the reason why no smartphone manufacturer offers small phones anymore is not because they want to, but rather because there is some non-obvious reason why they can't. My personal theory is because it's difficult to get proper display panels for smaller phones nowadays. The fabs producing the panels switched to larger sizes due to demand and efficiency, which resulted in no smaller panels with up-to-date specs (high-refresh rate, HDR, low power consumption, ...) to be available. I'd appreciate if somebody could proof me wrong, as that'd be quite a bummer otherwise.
I think this is the main reason, and why only Apple can afford to make a small slab phone. They can still make some margin with 5% of a massive number, while others can't make any.
Foldables seem like a better compromise here, and hopefully more like the zflip/razr get in this $700-800 range with stock android, good cameras, and decent battery life. The zflip 3 has been sold for $800, just give me stock android and I'd be a buyer. I'd be ok with a slightly slower processor if it means a better battery life, but within 10-20% of a flagship. Between a $450 6.1 inch Pixel 6a, or a $700-800 folding phone, it's going to be kind of tough to compete with a smaller slab phone if it's going to have to make more compromises to stay small.
I'd love a Nexus 4 sized phone again, but these aren't bad options, if you want small, go folding, or get a 6a. I'm sure the mini is a good option if you're ok with iOS.
Foldables are a crappy solution. I do not want a tablet. I have no desire to watch videos on my phone, and I don't need a huge screen for any of the things I do on my phone regularly -- text, listen to music, occasionally browse HN and reddit, take photos. I understand that they fold up to essentially become weird-aspect ratio very thick phones... but that's not desirable for me either, especially at the foldable price point of ~$1000+.
nit: Foldables aren't for video, aspect ratio is far from 16:9. Effective video size is not much bigger than non foldable. It's great for reading web/book/pdf.
- people tend to correlate size and price, and by default the correlation is direct (for some things it's inverse), so at similar capabilities (and thus prices) consumers will tend to go with the larger version
- for a smartphone specifically, there's a direct relationship between battery size and device size, and battery life is a really valuable convenience
The iPhone 13 mini has a 2400 mAh battery, the 13 has 3200. 33% more battery capacity is a lot, and at 2400mAh I don't think the mini doesn't survive an entire day of relatively heavy use without a charge.
> for a smartphone specifically, there's a direct relationship between battery size and device size, and battery life is a really valuable convenience
As the largest consumer of energy is the display of a smartphone, you don't need the same battery size to get the same runtime in a smaller phone. Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
> As the largest consumer of energy is the display of a smartphone, you don't need the same battery size to get the same runtime in a smaller phone.
The battery capacity grows much faster than the display energy consumption, and it's not even a fight: at otherwise equivalent hardware, the larger phone has always had better battery life than the smaller one in every iPhone generation.
The minis both suffered significant criticism due to battery life issues, compared to their larger sibling.
> Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
You can do the same on both smaller and larger form factors so that's not an advantage of the SFF phones.
And much to my dismay Apple remains very much not a fan of that: after having increased the phone depth to long-forgotten heights of 8.3mm (a chonk not seen since the 4S's 9.3), it's been reduced back down to 7.65 in the 13 (up a hair from the 12's 7.4). I fear an eventual return to the dark days of the 6S/7 and their 7.1mm you could shave with (but couldn't pick your phone off of the table for lack of ability to grip the thing without using your fingernails to pry it off).
> The battery capacity grows much faster than the display energy consumption, and it's not even a fight: at otherwise equivalent hardware, the larger phone has always had better battery life than the smaller one in every iPhone generation.
As an example, the Z5 Compact had a 2700mah battery in basically something ~1mm thicker than a 13 mini, which has a ~2400mah battery. The Z5 Compact is also a 7 year old phone, which didn't have wireless charging.
> The iPhone 13 mini has a 2400 mAh battery, the 13 has 3200. 33% more battery capacity is a lot, and at 2400mAh I don't think the mini doesn't survive an entire day of relatively heavy use without a charge.
Every iPhone person I know has complained about the 13 Pro being significantly thicker and heavier than the previous models. Literally, things like "it feels like a brick in my hand." Making phones thicker/heavier is an HN meme that is completely out of touch with what normies want. Consider that for most people, the phone is their primary device, and one they hold in their hand for ~6h a day.
one of the reasons newer iphones "feel like a brick" is that they transitioned to heavier materials (stainless steel instead of aluminum) and because the corners are now squared. rounding corners often has the effect of making things seem thinner as well as usually making things more pleasant to hold. I agree with you that these users probably don't want a thicker iphone, but I would bet if you focused on perceived bulkiness in the industrial design, you could sneek in a slightly larger battery and still give the impression of a less bulky device.
> one of the reasons newer iphones "feel like a brick" is that they transitioned to heavier materials (stainless steel instead of aluminum)
What do you mean by newer iPhones? They use stainless steel since 2017 in the models X, XS (Max), 11 Pro (Max), 12 Pro (Max) and 13 Pro (Max), so it's nothing new.
Your anecdote vs my anecdote here, but I have never, not even one time, heard someone complain about the thickness or weight of an iPhone. I highly doubt the average user would even notice let alone care if you made the device a bit thicker.
This would probably be a dealbreaker for a lot of people. Unihertz makes small android phones that are on the thicker side, and I've been hesitant to buy one because of their girth (despite there not being any alternative small android phones on the market).
The iphone 13 is 7.65mm. The Unihertz Jelly is 16.5.
Apple hasn’t made a phone thicker than 10mm since the 3GS, and that was 12.3 (up from the original 2G’s 11.6 because of the rounded plastic back vs flat aluminum).
Not the same size, the comparisons are misleading as both those phones look small compared to the 13 max. The SE has a form factor that matches many Android phones, small-phoners (like me) want to go smaller than that if possible.
I had the previous SE from years back and it's still my preferred size, the current mini is significantly bigger than it.
As an aside, I had to switch to the 12 mini as the old SE started becoming unusable due to its age. I did switch to a Pixel 4a temporarily but that was too big for what I wanted and traded it in as soon as I could.
Similarly, the F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US. #2 is the Silverado, and #3 is the Dodge Ram.
Clearly, this whole 'sedan' concept is a failed form factor, every manufacturer should only make pickup trucks. Why shoot for less than the #1 market spot?
Funnily, cars suffer from this same exact issue, but worse! Just like expanding phone screen size leads to suboptimal software on small screen sizes that devs don't target any more... expanding car size leads to safety compromises for sedans. If my 2000s Civic gets T-boned by a 2022 F150, I'll probably die, simply because the 2022 F150 will crush my car like a tank rolling over a tin can. When I try to drive around in my sedan at night, I'm constantly blinded because truck manufacturers don't account for low seat heights any more with beam cutoffs.
Who would buy a sedan any more when you're screwed over this way? With phones and vehicles, we're stuck in this prisoner's dilemma situation where larger sizes lead to less desirability of small sizes, and the cycle repeats over and over again.
Same thing happens with public transit/car usage -- as more people use cars, public transit thins out, deals with more traffic on the roads, and becomes scarier because there are fewer "normal" people on public transit to make you feel safe from crime.
Curious if there's an research on how to escape from this kind of death spiral -- my suspicion is that the only real way out is regulation, because otherwise there's no way to overcome the self-reinforcing impact of these decisions.
I don't know. I'm one of these people who wants a smaller phone. Not tiny but definitely wanted a smaller one. I know a couple of people who feel the same, bought an iPhone mini, and when I was looking for my last phone came across reviews specifically targeting this issue.
I don't use iPhones so don't really know very much, but my instinct is that it falls into this bundling fallacy about product characteristics (there might be another term for it; I don't know). It goes something like this:
Companies X, Y, and Z all market products with unusual characteristic A. But there's all sorts of other things about it that make it undesirable or less desirable, so the consumer is faced with trade-offs. In the context of choosing between desirable characteristic A, but also undesirable characteristics B and C, they choose another product because the cost of B and C is greater than the benefit of A.
But then the companies all conclude "no one wants A" because they half-assed the product, not realizing that it wasn't A that was the problem, it was the B and C they released it with.
I see this all the time. With clothing for example, they'll make a garment out of really nice material A, but then release it with this weird design that doesn't really appeal to anyone except a stereotype. With tech I've noticed that they don't really make it available at all sometimes. So there might be product X, but you can't really find it anywhere. With a phone, hypothetically, it might be "my phone broke this morning and I need one ASAP and all the brick and mortar shops around me only carry these specific things and not the iPhone mini."
Anyway, I don't know the iPhone mini from anything, but the bundling fallacy is so prevalent in these situations I'm skeptical. I know I faced this a bit when buying my last Android phone: the next smaller down, which I preferred based on size, and which wasn't even "small", wasn't that much smaller but also had other downsides.
Sometimes I almost feel like companies sometimes intentionally sabotage experimental products just not to deal with the headache of supporting more options in their supply chain.
Also, sometimes there are things that don't sell to a huge market, but do sell, and have a very devoted following. Smaller phones might be like that. In my experience sometimes these "devoted markets" sometimes expand into larger ones later (for example, everyone realizes 3 years from now they can't fit their phones in their pockets anymore and that it doesn't matter if they have a nice big phone to move their fingers around on if they have no place to put it).
> Sometimes I almost feel like companies sometimes intentionally sabotage experimental products just not to deal with the headache of supporting more options in their supply chain.
Except companies like Samsung throw out dozens of new models per year, which all differentiate only marginally, and none of them gets a SFF while maintaining higher quality of features (i.e. no cheap phone with 720 display and such).
Sometimes they get it right, like with the Samsung A40 from 2019, only to not pursue the sales for a true successor. Heck, me and a lot of my friends and relatives bought an A40 because of its size and fantastic display.
If you hadn't included the link to Macrumors, I'd have guess that the mini sells poorly because the iPhone SE is available and much cheaper. Personally I really surprised that the SE doesn't sell more.
Anecdotally, I wanted a Mini, but the lack of top-end cameras being available made me hesitant. I ended up buying a SE, since the neither phone was exactly what I wanted, but the SE was so much cheaper.
it's a sort of selection bias, it's only because of a niche unmet need that people take to their blogs to complain - so the only people clamoring are the one not getting what they want
same way the universe is perfectly made for us because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here, ya'know ?
I agree with you 100%
I am knocking on 50 years of age, but I have the eyes of an 80 year old! I'd LOVE to be able to use a 9" tablet as my primary phone.
I have a plethora of screens available to me, including a PC as my primary computing device; but when I'm on the go I need a _larger_ screen not a smaller one.
> So, by all accounts, the iPhone mini has been an extremely slow seller.
This narrative is cited a lot, and fueled rumors that Apple would kill the mini for iPhone 13. They didn't. So clearly it's profitable enough for them even though it's a comparatively low-volume product.
I think the issue with small form factor on Android is whether too many apps will have broken UI on such a small screen. Software support has been the issue with other innovative android phones, such as the LG Wing and even the original Samsung Fold.
> fueled rumors that Apple would kill the mini for iPhone 13. They didn't.
Apple plans pretty far ahead and moves slowly. When a phone goes on sale (like the iPhone 12 mini) the successor is already pretty far along in the pipeline, and I think it's unlikely they would cancel the successor based on a few weeks of sales data. They would at least wait until after christmas, at which point the 13 mini was probably already almost ready, at which point it probably doesn't make sense to cancel it anymore.
So if Apple nixes a product because it lacks demand, I would expect that to be after two years of sales. The decision might have been made already after the first year of iPhone 12 mini, but the decision would not affect the iPhone 13 lineup, only the iPhone 14 lineup.
You could see this slow product cycle when Apple failed to jump on the big phone trend. When the iPhone 5 came out, they underestimated the market for huge phones, and it took them two years to course correct and jump on the phablet bandwagon with the 6/6+. (And they had a phantastic quarter when they did since everyone has been waiting for a big iPhone for two years)
I have the 13 Mini. Multiple people have asked me what it was and then commented that they wish they knew about it when they got their current phone.
I think sales are probably limited significantly by the marketing plan of both Apple and the carriers that sell phones - I'm sure that the larger phones are more profitable.
Agreed. I love my 12 Mini, and my SE's before that. I'm also anti-case so the phone looks extra small compared to most. Fun to have someone take our photo with the phone, cause they always ask how ancient it is and are shocked to hear it is newer than the phone they have! Non-existent marketing doesn't help
Apple never releases a "pro" mini -- with the same camera/processor as the larger variants. Thinking back, the iPhone 5s was near the perfect size for my pockets.
These days I find myself leaving my phone more and more, only taking it when I probably need a camera.
It's hard to tell from the colors, but if you take the 8, the two SE models, the 12 & 13 minis that's closer to 15%. Those models are are about the same size.
I like to use the story of one of my parents. Big tall guy, never used technology, big fingers and always complained buttons were too small etc etc.
Now the guy loves his big iPad and his iPhone that he wouldn't go any size smaller because he'd struggle to see what's on the screen. The only challenge he has now is he likes the bigger phone, but struggles to keep it in his pockets when working, when you add in a protective cover.
People don't often know what they want, they're just driven by what they've had and whether they think it has worked for them, which most people can justify their own decision.
I do think however, that there will become a point where phones simply are too big. I'm just not sure how far off we are from that.
Worth point out; per the chart on the linked article it seems like the iPhone 12 Mini sold about as well as the iPhone 13 Mini, if I'm reading the colors correctly.
This is the problem with mobile stuff. It's always "one size fits all" and "fuck you if it doesn't work for you, too bad." I'm so tired of it I've just given up on normal smartphones. There's really nothing they add to your life when you look closely. I have a flip phone running "kai OS" now (which is actually pretty neat but I don't bother with a data plan) and a Linux PDA. I don't miss owning a smartphone at all, they're terrible.
From looking at other sites, the SE greatly outsells the mini (22M in 2020, projected 30M in 2022). It is typically Apple's #2 seller. If you add that in with the mini numbers, then it tells a different story.
Also, during the pandemic, faceid didn't work in public. People looking for a small phone had to choose between a more expensive model with more cameras and cheaper phone with working biometric authentication.
That skews all sorts of market share stats. Anyway, annual sales by model (the SEs are usually released at a different time of year) would make for a more meaningful comparison than calendar Q1 sales starting after Christmas and ending a few weeks after the SE launch.
Totally agree! I'm still on the Pixel 4a, starting to look at an upgrade but I don't think there is one. Luckily I don't demand too much from my phone, but making better pictures would be nice.
I miss my old Moto G1. Light and with a small form factor, and at the same time it was one of the first phones that were cheap but not low quality.
It made a breakthrough in a market where you either had an expensive Samsung or you dealt with cheap phones with very bad specs. This was ages ago, fortunately today there are more phones that are cheap but with acceptable specs.
Moto G1 had the perfect form factor, plus also the "rubber" like back which I really loved. I have no idea why glas surfaces on the back are a thing, I always have to use a phone cover as else it would slip my hands. The rubber the Moto G1 allowed for a safe and firm grip, that every phone should have on the back.
I'm not sure how similar it was, but when I saw this post my first thought was the original Moto X. Even today, I think I might rate that as my favorite phone of all time. Perfect size, flagship-ish specs, grippy texture without a case, etc. Then of course the next generation made it huge.
I wouldn't recommend them. Almost every single one is using a very old version of android.
Which is surprisingly usable, but there are some apps that don't work.
I also wouldn't actually log into anything unless you're ok being pwned. No security patches, plus sketchy cheap as dirt chips running it.
You can also not type on it. Maybe a sentence, but it'll take you 3x as long if not more trying to correct typos. If you do any text based communication, you're going to have a bad time.
Considering how much USA cell companies are trying to kill 3G, and the fact that 4G/LTE has been around for over a decade now... I'm not sure this makes sense for anybody any more.
It is a business, though, and if 5% of sales cost disproportionately more than 5% to produce, market, support, and all those things, then it’s fair to say “it doesn’t sell” and axe it.
I mean it's not like this has been a sudden shift, phones have been getting gradually larger over the years. I seriously doubt manufacturers would be using more materials to make a smaller amount of larger phones instead of more smaller ones if the larger versions didn't sell that much more.
There is no marketing. Bigger is just better. I got the regular sized iPhone and every time I pick up the pro max it feels good. It’s visually more striking, it’s nicer to use. It’s just a little harder to hold but with two hands is still fine.
I have a question: how do you cope with on-screen keyboard, when screen is small? I'd like to have a phone which doesn't take too much space in a pocket, but I found that below 5.5" I have too much struggle typing. Should we ask for a physical kbd (say N900 style) if we want a new phone anyway?
I have a 3" inch jelly2 and typing, while often annoying for something like urls, is overall ok. For regular texting text to speech works pretty well and the slide to type feature is pretty solid too.
But to be fair I bought it to spend less time on my phone, and the annoyances that it does have make the choice easy lol
I used 9x4 Thai keyboard layout on my 3.7" Nexus One. I mastered it and reached 40wpm without autocorrect/suggestions. After upgrading to 4.7" Nexus 4 I found that the screen is too big and I'd have to use swipe keyboard. I don't think I ever reached 40wpm again.
Then again, that was when in high school. Maybe my fingers grew bigger.
I have a somewhat larger phone, but I just don't type much on my phone. I only really use it for communication of logistics with people if I'm not home, or typing in addresses to navigate to, etc. Otherwise I wait until I have access to a real keyboard.
Due to my aversion of taking my electronics over international borders, I went on vacation a few years ago with a flip phone (LTE still), and found that T9 was too inconvenient for even basic logistics, so got a secondary Android phone after that.
With small defined as sub-6" I can almost recommend my Nokia 3.4. (I measure about 3/16" over.) I remember finding it a surprisingly tall/narrow ratio when I first got it though, so maybe it's suitable depending on what bothers you over 6".
Samsung A40 had a nice 5.9 screen with full HD+ resolution. Sold for under 250€. Unfortunately Samsung only releases such a phone once every five years. The successors were bigger, more expensive and less powerful.
That's 2cm on my current phone (XZ1 compact) which also has relatively big bezel and it's right at the limit of being able to be controlled with one hand.
It was really expensive and was impossible to get at launch. The optical zoom was a nice touch but I didn't really care for the weird aspect they have.
iPhone convert for the small form factor here, too. I had Android since the Galaxy S1, but in 2018 switched to the iPhone 8 as there was just no decent SFF android device. I considered the Pixel 3a, and I am glad that I didn't go for it as it dropped out of support and no longer receives security updates, while I'm today still on my fully supported and updated iPhone 8. Next phone will be one of the iPhone SE series.
It's not a "flagship" but it is fully featured - nothing spared - and half the size of my palm. The screen is just small enough to be too annoying to do anything really distracting on. I have gotten NOTHING but compliments on it since I started using it a month ago (on a reco I picked up here).
> Recently, AT&T released a whitelist of smartphone brands that will continue to work on their network after February 2022. Unfortunately, Unihertz products are not among them.
I hope someone sues AT&T for its discriminative policy.
> The screen is just small enough to be too annoying to do anything really distracting on
I'm a happy user of Jelly 2 for a half year now and I bought it for this single reason. It's fully featured so you can do anything, but the screen is so small that you do it only when there's a real need, so I'm not wasting time staring at the phone for no real reason.
Do you have any issues with apps and layouts misbehaving because of the small screen? Being annoying to type on is a feature, but is it basically impossible?
Sometimes websites with big popups fuck with you, but then again we ought to be avoiding those websites anyway. I haven't noticed any issues with apps.
Typing is much easier than you would think. With swipe typing it's almost at par.
I have one too, and I was suprised by how "not bad" it is for this. I can reach each key with my thumb, so I get muscle memory for each letter. The only issue I have is hitting W instead of E, as E is super common and it's far from the lower right corner.
I also use bitwarden for passwords, so the main thing I type without swype is the passphrase for bitwarden, and proper names that autocorrect will then proceed to change to the wrong thing afterwards anyways (just like a big android phone).
How long does the battery last? Does the phone feel thick in your pocket? (From the photos, it looks like the device is about the same width and height as a 2020 iPhone SE but significantly thicker.)
One concern with a very small phone is that it necessarily has a very small battery. If you can charge frequently, or you only use the phone for an occasional text message it may be OK for you, but if you're checking it every few minutes and active on social media you'll likely not be happy with it.
With regular use the battery lasts about as long as the iPhone 13 Pro, that is to say, slightly less than a full day. But the point of this phone is that ideally you are using it less.
I'm still using one, and the battery still lasts 2+ days between charges. All these people saying we can't have a compact phone with decent battery life, a headphone jack and an SD card slot are either uninformed or weirdly disingenuous.
That's good to know. My impression was based on other comments I had read (in particular about the Unihertz Jelly) and it seeming to make sense intuitively.
<3 this is awesome! It even has NFC! So you can use Google Pay with it? WiFi calling? Looks like the perfect Google Fi and international travel phone too with all the bands it supports.
Thanks for posting that. At first glance, it looks like one of those $20 burner phones from 7-Eleven, but looking more closely, it seems much better than that.
Love the idea of the IR remote. I miss that from my PalmPilot.
Is it waterproof? A small phone like this would be ideal for working out or hiking. But between sweat and rain, I'd want it to be waterproof for those scenarios.
Thanks. You're probably right. After my comment, I found the rest of their lineup, and it looks like the one that would suit my needs is the Atom: https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom
I think I might actually get this. How well does this work with Google Fi?
So years and years ago, when my main phone was a Nokia N900, I would occasionally walk into phone stores and see what was out there out of sheer curiosity. One day I saw an HTC Wildfire S, and I fell in love with the form factor right away. Unfortunately, I never bought it because I had my N900 and it was just too damn useful to justify giving it up for a cheap Android phone, and to this day I regret not buying one. It was so small and so cute and I wanted it, and now even if I do buy a used one on eBay it'll just be a glorified brick because it doesn't have LTE and no apps will run on its ancient version of Android. This is the closest thing I've ever seen to the HTC Wildfire S since... I think I actually will buy it, at least as a backup device.
- Battery lasts for 3 days with my usage (browsing when not at my desk, whatsapp, a handful of calls, android auto)
- Rugged / waterproof (IP68)
- Fits nicely in your hand
- 48 MP camera - not as good as Pixels, but good
- Good dual SIM setup
Cons:
- Thick; probably mostly due to the battery. Doesn't bother me, but if you wear skinny jeans and carry your phone in your front pocket it'll be noticeable
- Just got Android 11
- The built in walkie talkie is something of a gimmick since it chews up battery in standby/monitor mode. I thought it would be a useful backup since we live in the sticks w/o reliable phone signal. Get the Atom L instead
I had the Atom until AT&T said it wasn't compatible with their 5G forced switch over. Now I have the cheapest android they offer until I can find something else.
I had an original Jelly but battery life was miserable.
Don't know if you checked recently but Verizon was always way more expensive here as well but about a year or so ago we noticed they had started offering must more competitive pricing for families/individuals.
I love my Jelly 2. The only thing that it skimped on was the camera. The primary camera is worse than my Moto G5 was. It's adequate for my primary usage of "taking pictures of things I need to remember (serial numbers, receipts &c)" but nearly useless as a general purpose photography tool.
I also have a Jelly 2, I really like it and I used it as my main phone for a month.
The reason I switched back to my Samsung Galaxy is because I changed job and will need to use it for work, and frankly the Jelly is just too small to be efficient.
This looks great. I left my Pixel 2 for a Nokia flip phone running KaiOS for half of 2021, but the OS was underwhelming, with broken WebDav syncing that required me to manually import contacts and forgo my calendar.
I then upgraded to an iPhone SE, but miss Android apps like Termux, PDANet, and MiXplorer. iOS lacks compelling alternatives: A-Shell, iOS-Socks-Proxy (running in A-Shell), and Apple Files + Readdle's Documents are decent, but don't measure up to the aforementioned Android apps.
All that makes the Jelly 2 an attractive choice. It ticks the essential smartphone boxes but discourages excessive use (doom scrolling, Instagram, TikTok, Hacker News, etc).
“Price: $700-800 (again, we have no alternatives so we should be willing to pay a bit more!)”
Yeah, not going to happen - people in general are NOT going to pay more for a smaller phone. Even the iPhone mini is cheaper than the full size models.
I'm not paying more than $300 for any phone, small or big. My ideal size was the Xperia X Compact, but a little bit thinner and with no bezels. Or the phone I got after that one, a Samsung A40 but 1 inch shorter.
I think it's possible, if marketed correctly. I'd 100% pay more for a smaller phone, I'm desperate at this point. Imagine a campaign advertising a phone that doesn't get in the way when you work out at the gym, or go for a bike ride, or when you're doing yardwork. A phone that you can use on the subway, or while walking around. A phone that doesn't constantly suck you into Facebook or TikTok or whatever social media you use.
I love the size of my iPhone mini, and I've had multiple friends use my phone, and want to also shift into the smaller size; most didn't even know the mini was a thing.
Using the Pixel 4a. Basically the perfect form factor and size. I'd upgrade every 2-3 years to a new version of the same phone with minor updates like the chipset etc.
Dreading the day I'll have to start searching for a replacement :(
The Pixel 3a (my current phone) has a 5.6" screen, the 4a has a 5.8" screen and the Pixel 5 has a 6" screen. However, they're all approximately the same physical size, it's just the bezels that got smaller.
The 4a is actually a smidge smaller than the 3a. Much easier to handle, IMO, though not quite ideal.
Your point about bezels getting smaller is very true for the phones you mentioned. But you also left out the Pixel 4a 5G, the Pixel 5a, the Pixel 6, the Pixel 6 Pro, and the Pixel 6a. Which all ballooned massively in physical size relative to their predecessors.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadBut it’s increasingly clear that a small premium phone is not on the roadmap. So I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. My goal with https://smallandroidphone.com is to rally other fans of small phones together and put pressure on Google/Samsung/Anyone to consider making a small phone.
I have a very specific set of skills and industry connections that I have acquired over a long career in the hardware business (my first startup was Pebble). I will put them to use in our shared quest to get the perfect small Android phone. If no one else builds one, and enough people sign up...maybe I will be forced to make it myself.
If you want a small premium Android phone, this may be your last chance (ever?) to help bring back the phone category that we love.
Hopefully by then there is something available which continues the form factor. 4a has been the perfect successor to the Nexus 4, it's a little taller but other than that has practically the same footprint.
With the 6a moving in a different direction (eg: removing the headphone jack) I'm just hoping someone else comes along as a spiritual successor for the Pixel Xa-series.
The Sony seems to be the best alternative though I have no idea of the software quality.
Unfortunately, it looks like it won't be sold in the US. Does it support US LTE bands so I can import it at least?
I have an Xperia 10 II (or something like that, the slimmest Android device I could find back in early 2021). The back cover is cracked all over, to the point I sometimes get cuts on my fingers. Two of the corners have dents.
The back camera that takes the actual photo is several degrees off (like 10 or 15°) from whatever is used for the preview. Works perfectly in all the other ways. Probably isn't waterproof any more, but I never needed that before, either.
Pixel 5 - 144.7 x 70.4 x 8 mm
Samsung S22 - 146 x 70.6 x 7.6 mm
Zenfone 8 - 148 x 68.5 x 8.9 mm (could be higher thanks to narrower body)
Xiaomi 12X - 152.7 x 69.9 x 8.2 mm
Samsung S21 - 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
Sony doesn't produce phones, but remote controls. Their software is nice clean, but their camera is pretty bad, might as well buy Zenfone 8 if you don't mind camera.
SHIFT5me - 141,5 mm x 71 mm x 9 mm
https://shop.shiftphones.com/shift5me.html
I imagine few who have used one would ever be able to say this with a straight face. I never met an iPhone user who believed me when I told them all the photos I was showing them were taken with an Xperia XZc (1 and 2, respectively) and that's with every single one of them. There may be half a dozen compact smartphones that really compare to the XZ2c. Sony just gave up on them because the herd loves their phablets so much.
I am also a current owner of the Zenphone 8 and its camera is also decent. If it's really important that you be able to snap the best photos possible, though, they've been developing these discrete camera things for over a century (and the best of them will likely continue to outperform any general purpose device for the foreseeable future).
There's really nothing small about any of the Androids.
A headphone jack is much more useful for me personally than 5G, so I happily saved the money.
But for a few different reasons I ended up just getting my wife an S22 (non plus) and then inherited her S20 (non plus), which has a very similar form factor.
Definitely felt the OPs frustration in looking for compact Android phones. They just plain don't exist.
I dislike Apple for a lot of things but in this duopoly the size of a phone is such a fundamental characteristic that you’re out of options anyway.
I think most of the people are “swiper users” — the “content consumers” — so they want big phones and OEMs are simply making what the near 100% majority (yup!) wants.
It is, however, probably not a great idea to use a device that hasn't had a security update for several years.
Even if you were using a custom ROM and trusted that it was correctly patched (which is a big if) then there's hardware exploits on the Snapdragon 820, and I imagine there are probably similar on the Exynos 8890. Some of these can't be mitigated by software.
List of smaller Android phones with decent specs:
Pixel 5 - 144.7 x 70.4 x 8 mm
Samsung S22 - 146 x 70.6 x 7.6 mm
Zenfone 8 - 148 x 68.5 x 8.9 mm (could be higher thanks to narrower body)
Xiaomi 12X - 152.7 x 69.9 x 8.2 mm
Samsung S21 - 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
I'm not sure those other phones are any better in terms of running linux (termux) and those non-samsung ones don't even have dex so I don't even know what the high specs are for.
S22 should be good once it's no longer the latest phone and you can grab at a discount, and maybe Android 13 with KVM is out by then.
But I, like most people I expect, also use my phone for many other uses some of which make good use of a larger screen at higher resolution: in-car GPS and while running/walking out on the trails, web browsing and social media stuff that would not be pleasant on smaller screens, occasionally video. The better screen necessitates a bigger battery too, increasing the weight and size a bit more.
I'm not sure there is a solution for that, other than perhaps carrying two devices around. Most people would not be happy with that solution and tethering the bigger device to the smaller ones (so they share internet connectivity instead of both needing SIMs & paid accounts) will reduce the battery life of the small device noticeably (running the 4G/5G and WiFi radios constantly being quite a drain I find, when tethering a laptop to my main current phone).
For a lot of people who would want the smaller phone, there is a secondary need for which they want the larger one too, and putting up with a big device for everything is likely to be the preferable “compromise” compared to carrying two devices.
I've considered the two device approach, but the only really small phones (significantly smaller than my current main device) I found were cheap Chinese imports and one of the first corners cut on those is using a cheap battery that won't last long on active use. Battery life is why my current phone is large than the previous one (which was already larger than I'd prefer often) as it can last a goodly while in active use (GPS and screen on).
tl;cbatr: I suppose the point of this directionless rambling, is that I think the market for a smaller device, people who would actually buy one rather than just those who think it is something that should exist, is smaller than you hope.
Palm phone fwiw also got discontinued for lack of interest as far as I know.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Palm-PVG100-Premium-Unlocked-Titanium...
I think the last time I considered screen size a limiting factor for these activities was when the flagship phones had 4.5" screens or so. We've gone well beyond what's needed for me to find the screen large enough for regular activities, and well into the realm where I find using my phone with one hand to be uncomfortable.
People do that all of the time and gladly pay the extra $10 for a smaller “phone” - the cellular Apple Watch.
I will leave my phone in a heartbeat when I’m going to the gym, the pool, or anywhere else where a large phone isn’t convenient and I still want to be able to keep in touch with people
I never had a problem using a GPS on a small iPhone hooked up to a magnet on my dash in my car before, I can't imagine an extra inch and a half of real estate making that much of a difference.
On of the reasons I'd like a smaller device, though there is the already stated compromises around smaller battery too, and it being a general use device. If I had a small device with excellent battery life I could carry that normally and tether a larger device, in my backpack when not in such use, for mapping and other when needed (I'm not talking nipping out for 10K here, sometimes this is full- or multi-day walking-or-faster events).
> having to stick a gigantic slab in my pocket … reminds me that I've got a brick flopping around in my shorts.
While the perfect phone doesn't exist, I have found the holy grail of shorts: big enough pockets that the slab fits, but tight enough and small enough that it doesn't jiggle noticeably, but not tight to me such that is exacerbates sweat in that patch. Also, the phone for nav on long routes is tertiary, I have breadcrumb trail on my wrist and a printed map (on rip- & water-resistant paper), so if I'm going far enough to require a bag for water/foot/1st-aid/other then there is room for the slab in there too and it isn't too out of reach.
iPhone Mini with its H/W & S/W integration barely manages 4Hrs of SoT. An 'Android Mini' phone with its mini batteries, how can it match upto iPhone Mini? And mind you, low sale of iPhone Mini is also due to the 'battery/range anxiety' that its users have.
Upon that any Mini form factor needs to be even less thinner, as visual perception of thickness is inversely proportional to a form's face/back surface area. So for this mini phone to be reasonably attractive (not chunky) it needs to have a very slim profile; which translate to small battery.
It's gotten so bad I contemplated porting Android to the iPhone SE. Not the complete OS, just the userspace, enough to run SystemUI and apps.
Except: a headphone jack is a hard requirement. If a phone has no headphone jack, it could as well not exist for me.
I hope Eric eases up on the weirdly specific requirements, like dual rear cameras, symmetrical bezels, and a punchout front camera, and refocuses on features that make or break the phone to end users.
I said "phones", without qualification. So while your factoid is interesting, it has little to do with what I wrote.
A lot of people are willing to go without it because practically nobody makes smartphones with the jack any more. But given the choice of a phone with, say, 2% less battery and a jack vs. a phone with a slightly bigger battery and slightly better waterproofing... I'm pretty confident what more users would choose.
That being said... the Xperia compact series is all the proof you need that a small phone can have it all. Good battery life, flagship camera (though understandably you won't have as many sensors as a giant phone), a headphone jack, a microSD card, good battery life, waterproofing, a fingerprint sensor...
It's such a shame that people continually insist that technology we HAD in 2012-2016 is impossible today. All I want is an Xperia Z3 Compact with modern bands and software support.
It's not that I have never owned wireless headphones, in fact I am literally forced against my will to own and use them and am wearing them as I type. They have some convenience, but adding a headphone jack doesn't mean not being able to use bluetooth headphones - I should just be able to use both.
Security (no practical eavesdropping)
Simplicity (just plug the damn thing in and get a hard connection; the connected device is much simpler)
Options (nothing prevents having both Bluetooth AND headphone port)
The only reason it's eliminated is it's convenient for the manufacturers and they try to sell it as if we all want it, clearly a marketing lie.
https://bestsecuritysearch.com/hackers-can-eavesdrop-victims...
Eavesdropping on either the output of the headphones or the audio data before it leaves the computer/phone is the same for wired vs Bluetooth. The latter seems to be the mode used in the (pretty coo) hack you posted - it's software attacking the Realtek chip, which must be driven by the wire, so exploiting the quasi-equivalence/reversability of speakers/microphones and the back signal from the speaker diaphragms.
This still requires access to get malware onto the device itself, and I'm more considering 'drive-by' or remote attacks in my comment.
To do this against a ~1m wire with millivolt signals without putting a clamp around the wire seems pretty tough in contrast to cracking a signal that is explicitly broadcast with not great security. Not only that, while eavesdropping the signals on the headphone wires will yield only a conversation in the room, which can be much more easily gathered directly, cracking a Bluetooth 2-way comms channel will yield much greater access to the device.
For most of us, neither is a concern, but it certainly is for people who do have real security needs, e.g., I've read that the current VPOTUS specifically uses wired headphones for this reason. Many people who also work with Classified information, Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), or just with business security issues have the same need. Failing to produce a device with this capability is a failure to address a key and leading market.
1. I already have nice earphones, I don't want to spend another $200-$250 for no reason (the going price of most wireless earbuds I've been interested in)
2. Way lower latency than bluetooth.
3. I have too many things to charge as it is. The reduced anxiety of having 1 less device to charge is worth something to me. I know USB-C to 3.5mm dongles exist, but a headphone jack is still better.
4. I oppose the idea of companies artificially taking out basic hardware features (that we've always had for 10+ years) just so they can force more disposable consumer goods to their users year after year.
Yes, and now I ended up in an idiotic situation where I have to have a pair for every device I own, because switching bluetooth connections is an unbelivable pain in the ass. No such problems with wired - you only need one pair, you plug them in, they work, end of story.
Not to mention issues like audio sync, which is just broken as hell. As an example, using top of the line headphones(sony MX4s) + a top of the line phone(Galaxy S21), audio isn't in sync with anything other than youtube. Playing games? Enjoy hearing your shots 1s after you fire them. And using them with windows? Now everything is slightly out of sync, because windows is a flaming pile of garbage when it comes to bluetooth audio.
I would love a smaller phone then the pixel 3 but I'll stick with this for now, it's my absolute max size.
But anyway good luck with the project! I backed the first Pebble and I'll probably use Beeper once it's fully available. You have a history of delivering on your promises. I just want to wait a bit to see how this one turns out in detail.
Unfortunately it seems that it's a niche that doesn't generate enough revenue to get broader support.
5% of people who buy an iPhone think that the mini is a good choice, but literally every review or discussion of it is positively hysterical about battery life. If you haven't picked one up and handled it, you'd think that it offered no merit and was going to shut down 2 hours into the day.
I had the first Pebble and have fond memories. I have high hopes for this!!!! I also love hardware but I never made it stick for work. I was one of the first engineers at Mesur.io, but things didn't work out.
My other thought would be to make this highly configurable; there is a large cohort of HN crowd who also want an un-Googled Android phone, myself included. There are no un-Googled small android phones, however with Project Treble many of them can run GSIs such as this most popular one https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/releases . Of course Lineage OS deserves a mention, maybe you could ship with that, build on what the community already offers.
The Unihertz line of phones deserves mention, but also scorn; they do NOT support their old hardware at all. The Jelly had 1 update to Android 8.1 and was left for dead. Additionally the system updater software included in the stock ROM was spyware. So unfortunately they were written off in my book.
Finally, I would like to see band 71 LTE availability for T-Mobile in the US. It really makes a big difference in the sticks. Unihertz does not support that, and for that reason I am sticking with my iPhone SE 2016 for the moment (until I find a small Android phone....)
Can't wait to hear more!
With regards to Unihertz, I'll add on top of what you said, that they are hiding behind ""crowdfunding"" to give non-existent customer support, while devices have already passed Google certifications months ahead (so my guess is that the device is actually already produced when they start the crowdfunding). In my case, the smartphone I ordered never arrived, and I never got any compensation for it, even though
However, hardware-wise, they aren't too bad, so once you managed to receive it, and you flashed a GSI on it, it's a rather acceptable experience. I know someone daily-driving a GSI (I think it's ProtonAOSP?) on Unihertz Jelly 2, and they are happy with it.
In my opinion, Unihertz small phones are fun, but /too/ small. As the article says, target would be 5-5.5" borderless, 4.5" in Jelly2's format, and I couldn't find any model that match. Closest is Xiaomi Qin 2 Pro (I have it, the form factor is really awesome), but it is too thin and thus its battery is abysmal. (If anyone is interested in Xiaomi Qin 2 Pro, yes it can run GSI just fine, but it requires a bit of work - feel free to send me an email for help)
If the smaller screen wouldn't make the phone even thinner I probably wouldn't care enough to switch.
> Sub 6" display, matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini
No, bad. What most of us want are the particular set of trade-offs made by phones around 2015. Design wise, that means that you've got to have another hole in the bezel, because there's going to be an earphone jack. That's apparently anathema for modern phones, but probably 90+% of us want it. Again, that's Hacker News specific. I haven't polled the market in general. I just know that I (and many others) won't consider buying your phone unless it has a jack.
Likewise, I have not much interest in a phone with a hole punched in the screen (?!) for a camera or an ugly "notch". I realize this is more controversial, but I don't know the last time I even used a front camera. I think it's more in keeping with the ideal 2015 design to make the bezel just large enough to contain a camera, speakers, light sensor, flash/LED, etc. I would reluctantly buy a phone with a camera hole if it was otherwise acceptable and there was no ideal option on the market.
I'd prefer if the back were completely flat as well, with no camera bump. That's totally just my aesthetic preference though, I don't know how others feel. I think it should be possible to achieve this if we're going back to not worshiping thinness, and making the small phone thicker for the sake of battery life.
I'd also prefer a 16x9 display to whatever Apple is doing now. So much web video is still 16x9.
Your jump from "I want" to "90+% of us want" is an egregious failure in reasoning. You say that you haven't polled the greater market, but you also haven't even polled HN.
My comment is asserting that if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias, then it's also good to assume that the narrative around a headphone jack is not just sampling bias. That means we have to believe that a large percentage of users looking for a small phone are also looking for a headphone jack - basically, what I called a "2015" design.
All you need to do is look at iPhone sales metrics. The iPhone 12 mini and SE2 collectively were 10+% of iPhone sales in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021. 10% of iPhone sales is 24 million phones per year.
> if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias
_We_ aren't. You shouldn't be assuming anything about some supposed narrative on HN at all, and you definitely shouldn't trust your own perceptions of such a narrative when you've already shown that you mentally translate "I and also I saw some comments some times" into "90+% of everyone here".
Such a narrative not only doesn't really exist, even if it did exist it still wouldn't matter, because, again, we have sales numbers for small iPhones that prove that people buy tens of millions of them annually when available.
First of all I said 90% of people here who are interested in a small Android phone, not 90% of everyone here.
Second, I feel you're trying to make me feel like I've gone insane and can't trust my own eyes by pretending that threads about the lack of a headphone jack don't routinely make the front page here [1] [2] [3] and that comments about the lack of a headphone jack don't routinely become the highest voted comments in any thread related to phones.
I don't think your point about iPhone sales holds any water, because you could just as easily show that people buy phones that have headphone jacks. The 12 mini is a smaller phone than the 12, so you could argue that some people who don't care about the size of their phone might be preferentially buying the mini! There's no way to make an airtight argument for either a headphone jack or a small phone as someone arguing on a forum, but I believe there are a lot of people who want both.
Moreover, my argument is that the removal of the jack was not done for any engineering reason, but for profit and aesthetics. Even if you are right that 50% of people would use a headphone jack instead of 90%, that's still a perfectly legitimate reason to include one.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538881
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356405
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997487
The iphone 13 mini works well for me. No idea if this represents anybody elso on HN...
People have somehow managed to forget this, but phones have been waterproof since ... basically forever without forgoing a headphone jack. I could link probably half the phones made between 2012-2017, but this phone is actually linked by the site itself: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/16/9549247/sony-xperia-z5-r...
Honestly, I'm not sure what the issue is supposed to be here. I've literally never, in 12 years of owning a smartphone, dropped it in water. I have no clue how that's even supposed to happen short of it falling into a river.
Since this is a small phone, I suspect most people will probably not be using a case that adds significantly to the size. Just a guess on my part though. I can live with a camera bump if I have to, I just think a lot of us miss the candy bar designs of ~2014-2015.
If nobody makes something like this, I'll likely switch to iPhone 14 when it's released.
I'm very sad they discountinued it. I hope mine lasts forever or that either Palm or someone else fills this market gap for a small phone. If this initiative does it, thank you!
My highest requirement for a phone is that it easily fits into the front pocket of tight jeans so I can't ever even feel that it is there. The Palm Phone meets this requirement, haven't found anything else that does.
However, I think the era of small phones as we know it is over for now. The smallest we have is the Mini, and even that isn’t small.
In fact, I think the next version of the small phone will be flip phones. We already see this with the Samsung fold. I tried one and was pretty impressed, and I feel like this is the likely direction the industry may take.
However, I’m using my current phone for the next five or six years. I’m sure by then, the folding screen tech will improve a lot, and apple may even have their own version out by then.
With each generational increase of display size, The number of times I drop the phone over its lifetime increases proportionally. I've used android phones from 2.8" to 5.7" display as daily drivers over the past decade.
I assume, Many with small hands(palms) do face the issue of dropping phones, So I finding it quite surprising that 'Easily Repairable' wasn't included in neither 'Must have' nor 'Nice to have'.
Repairability is so important to me that, I have stopped buying new smartphones since 2017. My last/current phone has full-metal construction, is easily repairable, has security updates(sans proprietary blobs) via LineageOS and I'm planning to switch to a postmarketOS device from near-same generation for better security(Only bootloader is proprietary).
IMO in the age of Fairphone, there's no excuse for a non easily-repairable phone; Especially one which has community interests in mind. I wish you the best on this endeavor.
Have you come across pop sockets? Small collapsible self-adhesive handles for the back of your phone. They’ve made an absolutely massive usability difference to my phone usage (although I aim for the smallest handset I can get without compromising too much on quality anyway). Total game changer
Btw checkout Swiftkey's one-hand mode for typing, If you haven't already.
Fairphone, Founded on the principles of ethical consumerism have consistently delivered on their promises which by itself is an extraordinary feat in the world of smartphones (or) consumer electronics in general.
Occasional but common criticisms on their devices from HN include specs not being competitive with flagships and build quality not up to expected levels(But newer devices have got good feedbacks on the build quality).
They are only available in EU + few other countries, If you don't live in their supported countries list then getting their phone might not be advisable as getting the parts easily for repair is their main USP(Besides telecom radio support).
So if you use phone as a utility and not as sustenance then Fairphone is a good choice if you can get it, Besides money goes to a socially-invested business.
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/
Weight is indeed and important factor. I recently held an iPhone13 Pro Max with acrylic case and was shocked by its weight,
iPhone13 Pro Max: 240g
Pixel 6: 207g
I hope that extra weight goes towards rigidity of the phone, Anyways its not intended for people with small hands.
also, the physical buttons are way too easy to press. every time i hold it, i accidentally press something :(
5.5 inches is about the limit for me, with pretty avg hands, imo.
previous phones were sony xperia compacts. last one was xz2 compact and felt pretty good, though could have been a tad thinner/lighter.
Pixel 5 - 144.7 x 70.4 x 8 mm
Samsung S22 - 146 x 70.6 x 7.6 mm
Zenfone 8 - 148 x 68.5 x 8.9 mm (could be higher thanks to narrower body)
Xiaomi 12X - 152.7 x 69.9 x 8.2 mm
Samsung S21 - 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
S22 has almost identical dimensions as Pixel 5, so there is your upgrade. Personally I find all of these overpriced for what I need, I would be perfectly fine with 4A specs with better battery, so can't justify to upgrading to some of these.
Pixel 7 Pro dimensions: 163 x 76.6 x 8.7mm
Pixel 6 dimensions: 158.6 x 74.8 x 8.9 mm
Pixel 6 Pro dimensions: 163.9 x 75.9 x 8.9 mm
The Galaxy S22 has a similarly-sized screen, but the EU version is rubbish.
My phone requirements haven't changed much in the last ten years. I bought one of the first "phablet" phones with a comically oversized 5" screen that got me ribbed by friends ("compensating for something eh mate?") Now 5" is at the bottom of the available size range. I'm a smallish person/manlet and don't need a phone I'm going to drop, but I do need something big enough that I can reliably type on it.
I'll gladly support your endeavor. Thanks for taking the initiative.
edit: fine with me to make the phone thicc so it has a day+ battery life. A little thicker is far easier to hold on to, anyway!
edit2: I did own a Pixel 6 non-XL for about a day. It was large, but the bigger problem was that I found it incredibly topheavy, which made it difficult to hold on to. I swapped for a used 4a 5G, which is a well-balanced midsized device.
* Great cameras
* Stock Android OS
There are plenty of recent small smartphones with a display under 6". But most of them use Android Go and a not-great camera. I have recently tested one, the Logicom Le Wave, a 60€ phone with a 4" display sold in Europe.
During my test, i have find Android Go 11 very reliable. It's even more easy to avoid using Google applications and to not link the phone to a Google account (by using F-Droid & Aurora Store) than Stock Android. There are also nice features for managing battery usage. That said the two cameras are indeed crap (but i do not take photos with a phone, for this i use a real cameras). My main problem with this phone is that it's also bad for... phoning: I mean than the sound quality is crap too.
I was probably unlucky with my choice, but there are plenty of alternatives for 4" to 6" smartphones. Search for "teenage" or "unbreakable" phones.
If the real objective is to have a light phone, who fit nicely in the pocket, than can be used one-handed and who won't fall out of the pocket while bicycling, then this sort of phones are perfectly fine. So my question is why the need of a good camera and stock Android ?
(For the main point, i agree with you, smartphones are becoming ridiculously too big)
There's also the Cyrcle Phone (https://www.cyrclephone.com/) which doesn't seem to be for sale anymore after its Kickstarter and Indie Go Go campaigns.
The battery is the main issue, about 2h of use or 1 day if in power saving mode with every optimization applied.
It's still good enough as a travel phone, turned on only when I need to call.
The only drawback is that the battery life has gotten worse since I originally bought it. But if I could easily swap that out, I would keep it for another five years.
EDIT: Oh, and the fingerprint scanner on the power button seems to work way more reliably, IMO, than the embedded fingerprint scanners under the touchscreens.
The S22 (standard version) has slightly bigger screen but is quite similar in size, so that is probably what I will use next.
I'm not saying it's trivial (it's not hard, but has a large enough amount of small actions to execute), but it's definitely worth doubling (or more) the phone duration.
The FamousProducer™ of my phone supported it for 3 years. This is terrible. LineageOS allows me to use it now - over 3 years after the end of support. Screw FamousProducer™.
Given that the S10e's battery life is already waning, I'm not sure I want to do that. But yes! If there were a safe way to do so, I would gladly run LOS on the phone for ten years.
Another brand that seems to be well supported (although not as extensively, timewise, as Samsung) is Google. LineageOS still supports the Pixel 1.
Why be so coy about this? Naming and shaming should serve as a warning to those who might buy one expecting long term support, or as a spur to action towards LineageOS for those who many have been or are about to be blindsided by the support window expiring.
My real problem isn't the previous 3 year window but that it counts from the first day they sell it, not the last. I bought my current phone, a Pixel 3a, late in its cycle for cheaper, early in 2020. It's now basically at the end of its updates because the guarantee counts 3 years starting from the release date in mid-2019, not from when I bought it.
5 years is obviously preferable but I'd like them to have also shifted it to be based on when they stop selling them new.
If you buy from Amazon Renewed, for example, you have no idea exactly what you'll get. You could get a pristine unit without a scratch on it with a battery that has barely 10 cycles, or you could get a well worn (with plenty of micro scratches and minor nicks) with a battery that's been cycled 500+ times. It's kind of a crap-shoot when it comes to buying refurbished.
As someone who takes pride in keeping my phones absolutely perfect and even micro-scratch free, it's too much of a risk.
I really don't know why people think they need a new phone every year. I've had 2 in the past decade. Both bought cheaply second hand [previous one am HTC One M8] and I got years of use out of each. In fact the One M8 is still working fine, apart from the degraded battery life.
Disable animations and it s not really slow.
There's absolutely no replacement for this phone right now. Flagship specs, amazing camera, decent battery, SD card, headphone jack, 1440p screen. There's nothing like it.
PS: the in screen fingerprint sensor was quite horrible initially, but updates over the years have made it quite similar to a regular sensor.
So, by all accounts, the iPhone mini has been an extremely slow seller.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?
---
I see these meme on tech sites all the time: “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a lot of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity. Aging populations like them because you can use screen zoom features to really blow up that text size without making the effective viewport too small.
And…people just like big stuff. I know that’s simplistic and a little condescending, but then look at SUV and truck sales.
Whereas, fitting a top-line Snapdragon into a small phone is a challenge. There’s a reason why top-tier phones have copper heatpipes, vapor chambers, and so on. All things no iPhone has or needs.
You could still do a small Android phone, but you might have to abandon the idea of including a Snapdragon 8.
* https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/21/cirp-iphone-13-best-selling-l...
5% of 200,000,000 is 10,000,000.
5% can be a huge number, or a tiny number, depending on what it's 5% of.
I switched from Android to Apple specifically for the iPhone mini, and if they killed it, I would switch to the smallest phone on the market.
Good luck with your switch.
For example: I upgrade my phone every two years or so, so long as I like the new phones. If I don’t like the new phones, I wait as long as possible.
People that like smaller phones won’t necessarily leave the iPhone if they kill the Mini - they will just keep their current phones for as long as possible. And that can indeed hurt sales, even if Apple doesn’t lose market share.
Was a hard decision, because my Android was rooted with LineageOS, was able to block ads and all kinds of nice things.
But ultimately, it just pissed me off too much to carry around a bulky phone (Fairphone 3).
Fairly happy with the 12 mini, just don't like the Apple ecosystem that much.
SE is clearly a 'budget' (at least for apple) phone. Some people really want a small phone that isn't.
The newest SE is substantially larger and worse.
I love my mini, but it’s also clear this is the last one.
I tried an iPhone 6S for a year before I got this phone. Couldn't stand the size. The current SE is the same size as the 6S. I'm basically stuck at a dead-end of phone size.
The current SE is not compact by historical standards. I'm not saying all phones need to be smaller, I just want one decent option.
There is no such thing as a small flagship.
(Not sure how good this example is, but anyway - flagship doesn't have to be physically giant.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagship#Flagship_as_metaphor
Now, whether an iPhone Mini fits into that metaphor can be debated, but it's just a metaphor, after all. :-)
Let's assume very few people are switching ecosystems at this point based on form factor. That would mean Apple made a new product to cannibalize 5% of their existing market. No similar product exists in the android ecosystem. It seems reasonable that an android phone maker could get similar market share but have these sales come from a combination of their existing sales and competitors sales.
Then why is Apple dropping it ?
I think there is also some competition with the iPhone SE. Even though the Mini is not intended to be a budget phone, it is 100 Euro cheaper than the non-mini. So, I can imagine a chunk of people would buy it for its lower price if the iPhone SE didn't exist. Even more if you consider that the Mini actually has a larger screen than the SE.
I really really want a Pro Mini :(
I feel like my plan right now is to hope with the iPhone 14 launch, the 13 mini will continue to be sold with a price drop, and then I'll upgrade my 12 mini to the 13 mini and get the battery improvement. I love the size of this phone and hope I'm never forced back to the gigantic "normal-sized" phones that we've gotten stuck with the past decade.
For one - most of the iPhone Mini sale is because of 'Halo effect', die hard fans who anyway would have bought an iPhone, bought the mini version. An Android phone maker will not have that brand pull or halo effect to establish a new category, so it would be no where near that 10M number.
Second, iPhone or Mac devices are known for hardware and software integration. That translates among other things to good battery life (similar to RAM. Apple never talks about RAM).
iPhone Mini has been weak in battery department [1], one of the factor in its low sale as compared to bigger device. A Mini Android device will have mini batteries, that means it will have no chance in h* to last through the day - the minimum requirement in this day and age.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/20/apple-iph....
As far as I am concerned, the mini IS the flagship. I would never even consider buying one of the larger models, as I consider them to be subpar, unpleasant devices to carry and to use. I'd choose to carry no phone over having to carry a full-sized phone, they have become too large to be considered conveniently portable.
For me, the perfect smart phone would be the same size and shape as a credit card, edge-to-edge screen on all sides, and approximately 3mm thick. And it would run iOS of course.
Citation needed? A lot of people love to jump to the conclusion that nobody wants small phones. My personal experience does not align with that conclusion. I'm happy to accept this conclusion if you have some kind of evidence for it, but the linked article just discusses battery life, which was greatly improved in the iPhone 13 Mini anyway.
might have been true for mini 12, but mini 13 has amazing battery life, certainly nothing like 2020 SE which is truly abysmal.
My previous Xperia Compact, which is of about the same dimensions as mini, survived for a couple of days easily when new.
> iPhone Mini has been weak in battery department [1]
The article says "solid battery life", which matches my experience with 13 mini.
I think you can make a profitable niche selling smaller phones. Most people don't want a 12" laptop either as they consider it too small, but some people do and various companies still make a profit designing and selling them. I don't quite understand why it's so different for phones.
I'm inclined to think that applies more to Americans than people generally. Europeans and Australians can be quite content with smaller vehicles, smaller properties, and quite frankly smaller lifestyles.
Also curious where you're from that you never heard of this.
A simple example of what I mean is traffic lights. I've lived in many European countries, including Germany, and travelled a very fair bit in the rest. In Germany, traffic lights are green for cars for a long time and green for pedestrians a very short time (feel free to measure this at any traffic light in your city). In countries where infrastructure is planned around humans, it's the other way around.
Cycling is another example of this. Germany doesn't have "bad weather for cycling". People cycle to work in winter in Helsinki and don't bat an eye. The difference is infrastructure. Helsinki has not only built the roads, lights and the rest around it, but they also ensure it's in good condition. When it snows, bike paths often get cleaned before car roads. It's a matter of choice. I bring up Helsinki because it's easier to compare. Netherlands and the like are so far ahead everyone else in humane cities that the comparisons are hard to make. Helsinki is a good example because their developments are recent and go to show that you can choose to live a different way.
Watching German politics more closely during those years, I have seen that choices between: is better for car owners, is better for something else, gets decided in favor of is better for car owners 90% of the times. Heck, even some members of the Green Party are very cozy with the car industry (e.g. Kretschmann).
It is a bit unusual outside of the Netherlands and Denmark.
I tried to cycle to work 8km or so and it was fine until I had to cross a slope. And since this slope was etched by the nearby river, it went through the whole city, so there wasn't any way around it.
Took all the fun out of it honestly, especially during heatwaves.
The Germans probably don't know that with 2cm of snow, all the other means of transport, including the Amsterdam metro, stop working. So bicycle it is. I loved my 25km (round trip) bike commute when I lived there, it was such a great way to clear my head before/after work.
I'd love to get my wife a bigger car, so she wouldn't be scared of driving in the snow, but just buying it would be three times the price (or more) compared to the small car she's currently driving.
I'm from Europe, living in bigger European city, and I have a small car (3-door RAV4). I bought it so I can drive and park easily in the city and go up hills and mountains when I leave the city once a month.
And if I'm honest, that is the best car I could afford. I see lots of rich people with bigger and bigger SUVs cruising in the city in Germany: G wagons, BMWs, Audis, Volkswagen Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes everywhere.
I went on a road trip in the US, rented an SUV that would be huge and impractical here, but there, it actually felt small. The roads were wide, traffic wasn't bad, parking was easy. I loved it.
If I lived in the countryside in Europe where I need to transport stuff for my ranch/farm (and if I could afford it), I'd definitely consider buying a pickup truck.
The same goes for properties. The reason why I lived in a 30sqm apartment with my wife was that is all I could afford while living in the city, close to good job opportunities. I would have been obviously happier if I could have a 300sqm house.
This is not necessarily true, though something people often believe.
In my case, I don't see why I would be sad over having a bit more place. It would be nice to have a place for an office, a small home gym, bigger kitchen, dining room, terrace with a BBQ, etc.
I'm not saying it would solve every problem in my life, but it would make a couple of things less inconvenient.
> RAV4
Viewpoint from Japan: is it small?. I feel same thing for BMW Mini because it's bigger width than average on the road.
E.g. vans within the Kei (keijidōsha) classification pretty much don't exist in Europe, but are common in Japan.
1: https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2022/01/...
Australians will jump at the largest, cheapest Soniq TV JB Hi-Fi sells. Likewise (with 'local' brands) in the UK.
People with smaller hands want to be able to operate the phone fully with one hand.
Unless they used something akin to a laptop webcam, there simply isn’t enough space for a third camera.
My wife's solution to iPhones being too big was to upgrade all of her handbags and to buy flouncy dresses with pockets.
Wanna trade families? Please?
Wow, angry much? I suggest contacting your local mental health crisis hotline before you turn your internet rage into something people actually care about. In the United States, just dial 988.
Failing that, try getting a sense of humor. They're nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Youngman
If you thought the joke was distasteful, say it was distasteful. But pretending it was serious and loudly letting us all know you are against trading human beings is some of the lamest virtual signalling I've ever seen.
I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews and modern American perception. Why is being able to buy niche products somehow not a worthy thing to be desired?
Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world.
On HN, if you can't serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.
It's why so many people on HN don't understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don't understand artisan anything. They've forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can't grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand.
"X doesn't scale" is HN for "I know nothing about how the world works."
But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.
If anything, mobile phone market is exceedingly horrible because of consolidation into a single product with not much choice.
Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-ch...
And in 2018, One Plus had a $3,000 phone:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-...
Many PC companies failed before Apple succeeded. Apple itself failed to the point of almost being acquired by Sun before succeeding by buying NeXT and shipping some hit products in the form of colourful iMacs and iPods with click-wheels.
The biggest problem with luxury products is that they have almost nothing to do with the product's tangible features and everything to do with whether you can establish a valuable brand. We live in a world where people spend thousands of dollars on fancy numbers that we have a kind of gentleman's agreement signify that they "own" a jpeg anyone can copy.
I suggest that there is absolutely a market for ridiculously priced phones, but the problem is not hand-crafting a phone with rare materials, the problem is creating the collective hallucination that owning such a phone will make other people envy you.
Apple actually sold some solid gold watches. There was a market for a $18,000 Apple Watch. It wasn't something worth sustaining in perpetuity, but there was a market. They also launched ridiculously priced accessories from Hermes, and there is still a market for them almost a decade later.
People will pay large amounts of money for exclusive items, but it takes a particular set of skills to launch something and convince the world it's the must-have accessory of the moment.
The "RED Hydrogen One," by that fancy camera company is closer I think. At least it had some story that could hypothetically have ended with a compelling technological reason for it to exist (RED is supposed to know cameras). Although, it didn't seem to work out either, but with a sample size of 1 it could be a fluke of poor execution.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/red-quits-the-smartp...
I'm surprised none of the really consumer-oriented camera companies have broken into smartphones. Camera stuff seems like more of a selling point for smartphones, than phone stuff. But, it seems like they never really want to dive in fully.
I enjoyed MrMobile's review: https://youtu.be/skIgG8q_lKs
Grains of sand getting into the hinge and mandatory factory-installed screen protectors are not things I want to deal with on a purchase that expensive.
The current folding generation launching this year (4th Gen) is likely to be the next big thing, rumors are huge price drop and likely a more polished experience as production is ramping up for more units.
Indeed, all those things are much much easier and cheaper to produce than a smartphone. You could do them at your home.
Try building from scratch a small Android phone at home.
We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
Without carrier phone whitelist, you won't be able to call on AT&T and many other networks.
I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.
The whole point of a lot of things is that they are unscalable and if they somehow do scale they are not longer what they were.
We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear.
It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?
> Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead.
IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.
It's not a "bad thing" about HN or American perceptions -- it's economic reality: it just isn't cost effective for the big incumbents to pursue, and it's (likely) beyond the scope of a grass-roots, Kickstarter-style effort.
For example in Spain, the Pixel 6 Pro was only sold for a few days in February, then sold out, then returned a few days ago - so it only seems to start being consistently available now, and it's a 2021 phone. Oh, and only the 128 GB model is sold here. I had to ask an Australian friend to mail a 512 GB one to me!
And at least, they do sell it here. In most countries, you can't even buy it.
Compare to iPhone where you can get every model with every storage capacity consistently, in Spain, and in the overwhelming majority of countries in the world.
I've even seriously considered switching to iPhone for this very reason, by the way.
That really doesn't say much. Google has never figured how to sell hardware, nor shown the will to learn. If Google was trying to sabotage the sales of the Pixel line, it could probably not do a better job.
My way of dealing with it is two phones. Besides my smartphone, I still use my more than ten-year-old Nokia when I do not want to take the big smartphone with me. Of course, it only has phone, SMS and a clock. But I usually do not need anything else when I go for a walk or meet up with friends. I just want to be reachable in case there is a problem.
Its old battry still lasts quite a long time, and I have it switched off most of the time anyway. So I can go 7+ days without recharging.
What could change that would be the availability of a smartphone that turns into a PC/laptop when connected to a docking station. I suspect that Microsoft is pursuing such a plan with the integration of Android into Windows 11. Let's see ...
Because it's not Apple selling them and Android smartphone manufacturers operate with much lower margins.
Take Motorola for example, which isn't even one of the 10 largest smartphone manufacturers. They released ~30 different smartphone models in the past year alone, so they apparently make money, even if they don't sell millions of units per model.
Yet none of the models released in the past year has a height shorter than 159mm or a weight lighter than 155g.
I believe the reason why no smartphone manufacturer offers small phones anymore is not because they want to, but rather because there is some non-obvious reason why they can't. My personal theory is because it's difficult to get proper display panels for smaller phones nowadays. The fabs producing the panels switched to larger sizes due to demand and efficiency, which resulted in no smaller panels with up-to-date specs (high-refresh rate, HDR, low power consumption, ...) to be available. I'd appreciate if somebody could proof me wrong, as that'd be quite a bummer otherwise.
Foldables seem like a better compromise here, and hopefully more like the zflip/razr get in this $700-800 range with stock android, good cameras, and decent battery life. The zflip 3 has been sold for $800, just give me stock android and I'd be a buyer. I'd be ok with a slightly slower processor if it means a better battery life, but within 10-20% of a flagship. Between a $450 6.1 inch Pixel 6a, or a $700-800 folding phone, it's going to be kind of tough to compete with a smaller slab phone if it's going to have to make more compromises to stay small.
I'd love a Nexus 4 sized phone again, but these aren't bad options, if you want small, go folding, or get a 6a. I'm sure the mini is a good option if you're ok with iOS.
- people tend to correlate size and price, and by default the correlation is direct (for some things it's inverse), so at similar capabilities (and thus prices) consumers will tend to go with the larger version
- for a smartphone specifically, there's a direct relationship between battery size and device size, and battery life is a really valuable convenience
The iPhone 13 mini has a 2400 mAh battery, the 13 has 3200. 33% more battery capacity is a lot, and at 2400mAh I don't think the mini doesn't survive an entire day of relatively heavy use without a charge.
As the largest consumer of energy is the display of a smartphone, you don't need the same battery size to get the same runtime in a smaller phone. Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
The battery capacity grows much faster than the display energy consumption, and it's not even a fight: at otherwise equivalent hardware, the larger phone has always had better battery life than the smaller one in every iPhone generation.
The minis both suffered significant criticism due to battery life issues, compared to their larger sibling.
> Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
You can do the same on both smaller and larger form factors so that's not an advantage of the SFF phones.
And much to my dismay Apple remains very much not a fan of that: after having increased the phone depth to long-forgotten heights of 8.3mm (a chonk not seen since the 4S's 9.3), it's been reduced back down to 7.65 in the 13 (up a hair from the 12's 7.4). I fear an eventual return to the dark days of the 6S/7 and their 7.1mm you could shave with (but couldn't pick your phone off of the table for lack of ability to grip the thing without using your fingernails to pry it off).
As an example, the Z5 Compact had a 2700mah battery in basically something ~1mm thicker than a 13 mini, which has a ~2400mah battery. The Z5 Compact is also a 7 year old phone, which didn't have wireless charging.
So make it 3mm thicker?
What do you mean by newer iPhones? They use stainless steel since 2017 in the models X, XS (Max), 11 Pro (Max), 12 Pro (Max) and 13 Pro (Max), so it's nothing new.
The iphone 13 is 7.65mm. The Unihertz Jelly is 16.5.
Apple hasn’t made a phone thicker than 10mm since the 3GS, and that was 12.3 (up from the original 2G’s 11.6 because of the rounded plastic back vs flat aluminum).
Well, it's up against the iPhone SE, which has the same size, same weight and the same processor. [1]
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone13m...
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-12-mini,...
I had the previous SE from years back and it's still my preferred size, the current mini is significantly bigger than it.
As an aside, I had to switch to the 12 mini as the old SE started becoming unusable due to its age. I did switch to a Pixel 4a temporarily but that was too big for what I wanted and traded it in as soon as I could.
Clearly, this whole 'sedan' concept is a failed form factor, every manufacturer should only make pickup trucks. Why shoot for less than the #1 market spot?
0: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/ford-exec-says-this-is-why-it-s...
Who would buy a sedan any more when you're screwed over this way? With phones and vehicles, we're stuck in this prisoner's dilemma situation where larger sizes lead to less desirability of small sizes, and the cycle repeats over and over again.
Same thing happens with public transit/car usage -- as more people use cars, public transit thins out, deals with more traffic on the roads, and becomes scarier because there are fewer "normal" people on public transit to make you feel safe from crime.
Curious if there's an research on how to escape from this kind of death spiral -- my suspicion is that the only real way out is regulation, because otherwise there's no way to overcome the self-reinforcing impact of these decisions.
I don't use iPhones so don't really know very much, but my instinct is that it falls into this bundling fallacy about product characteristics (there might be another term for it; I don't know). It goes something like this:
Companies X, Y, and Z all market products with unusual characteristic A. But there's all sorts of other things about it that make it undesirable or less desirable, so the consumer is faced with trade-offs. In the context of choosing between desirable characteristic A, but also undesirable characteristics B and C, they choose another product because the cost of B and C is greater than the benefit of A.
But then the companies all conclude "no one wants A" because they half-assed the product, not realizing that it wasn't A that was the problem, it was the B and C they released it with.
I see this all the time. With clothing for example, they'll make a garment out of really nice material A, but then release it with this weird design that doesn't really appeal to anyone except a stereotype. With tech I've noticed that they don't really make it available at all sometimes. So there might be product X, but you can't really find it anywhere. With a phone, hypothetically, it might be "my phone broke this morning and I need one ASAP and all the brick and mortar shops around me only carry these specific things and not the iPhone mini."
Anyway, I don't know the iPhone mini from anything, but the bundling fallacy is so prevalent in these situations I'm skeptical. I know I faced this a bit when buying my last Android phone: the next smaller down, which I preferred based on size, and which wasn't even "small", wasn't that much smaller but also had other downsides.
Sometimes I almost feel like companies sometimes intentionally sabotage experimental products just not to deal with the headache of supporting more options in their supply chain.
Also, sometimes there are things that don't sell to a huge market, but do sell, and have a very devoted following. Smaller phones might be like that. In my experience sometimes these "devoted markets" sometimes expand into larger ones later (for example, everyone realizes 3 years from now they can't fit their phones in their pockets anymore and that it doesn't matter if they have a nice big phone to move their fingers around on if they have no place to put it).
Except companies like Samsung throw out dozens of new models per year, which all differentiate only marginally, and none of them gets a SFF while maintaining higher quality of features (i.e. no cheap phone with 720 display and such).
Sometimes they get it right, like with the Samsung A40 from 2019, only to not pursue the sales for a true successor. Heck, me and a lot of my friends and relatives bought an A40 because of its size and fantastic display.
same way the universe is perfectly made for us because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here, ya'know ?
- Sent from my iPhone 13 mini
I have a plethora of screens available to me, including a PC as my primary computing device; but when I'm on the go I need a _larger_ screen not a smaller one.
This narrative is cited a lot, and fueled rumors that Apple would kill the mini for iPhone 13. They didn't. So clearly it's profitable enough for them even though it's a comparatively low-volume product.
I think the issue with small form factor on Android is whether too many apps will have broken UI on such a small screen. Software support has been the issue with other innovative android phones, such as the LG Wing and even the original Samsung Fold.
Apple plans pretty far ahead and moves slowly. When a phone goes on sale (like the iPhone 12 mini) the successor is already pretty far along in the pipeline, and I think it's unlikely they would cancel the successor based on a few weeks of sales data. They would at least wait until after christmas, at which point the 13 mini was probably already almost ready, at which point it probably doesn't make sense to cancel it anymore.
So if Apple nixes a product because it lacks demand, I would expect that to be after two years of sales. The decision might have been made already after the first year of iPhone 12 mini, but the decision would not affect the iPhone 13 lineup, only the iPhone 14 lineup.
You could see this slow product cycle when Apple failed to jump on the big phone trend. When the iPhone 5 came out, they underestimated the market for huge phones, and it took them two years to course correct and jump on the phablet bandwagon with the 6/6+. (And they had a phantastic quarter when they did since everyone has been waiting for a big iPhone for two years)
I think sales are probably limited significantly by the marketing plan of both Apple and the carriers that sell phones - I'm sure that the larger phones are more profitable.
Edit: Yup, it’s nowhere to be seen on apple.com homepage. They don’t push it at all.
These days I find myself leaving my phone more and more, only taking it when I probably need a camera.
The iPhone 5 was the perfect size, and I miss that form factor. But The camera is what sells me the device.
Now the guy loves his big iPad and his iPhone that he wouldn't go any size smaller because he'd struggle to see what's on the screen. The only challenge he has now is he likes the bigger phone, but struggles to keep it in his pockets when working, when you add in a protective cover.
People don't often know what they want, they're just driven by what they've had and whether they think it has worked for them, which most people can justify their own decision.
I do think however, that there will become a point where phones simply are too big. I'm just not sure how far off we are from that.
I knew the response sounded American, then this clarified it. I’d like to see the sale of phone sizes by country.
Also, during the pandemic, faceid didn't work in public. People looking for a small phone had to choose between a more expensive model with more cameras and cheaper phone with working biometric authentication.
That skews all sorts of market share stats. Anyway, annual sales by model (the SEs are usually released at a different time of year) would make for a more meaningful comparison than calendar Q1 sales starting after Christmas and ending a few weeks after the SE launch.
It made a breakthrough in a market where you either had an expensive Samsung or you dealt with cheap phones with very bad specs. This was ages ago, fortunately today there are more phones that are cheap but with acceptable specs.
It's a 2.5 inch 3G Android phone. http://www.cwell-hk.com/products/SOYES_XS11.aspx
Lots of small Android phones are in the recommended section on cwell-hk in the $40 range.
Now can I have one with Android 11 and a halfway decent camera?
They're kidding, right?
Which is surprisingly usable, but there are some apps that don't work.
I also wouldn't actually log into anything unless you're ok being pwned. No security patches, plus sketchy cheap as dirt chips running it.
You can also not type on it. Maybe a sentence, but it'll take you 3x as long if not more trying to correct typos. If you do any text based communication, you're going to have a bad time.
Overall, not worth it.
There's definitely been cases of spyware locked onto chips in clever ways. Not good for 2FA.
http://www.cwell-hk.com/products/SOYES_XS12.aspx
Considering how much USA cell companies are trying to kill 3G, and the fact that 4G/LTE has been around for over a decade now... I'm not sure this makes sense for anybody any more.
Sad to say but ruthless supply chain and product range efficiency is one of the pillars of Apple's return.
Paraphrasing Contact: First rule in cell phone building: why build small when you can build twice as big at twice the price?
I've given up. My plan is buying a dumbphone until Pine is usable by me.
But to be fair I bought it to spend less time on my phone, and the annoyances that it does have make the choice easy lol
Then again, that was when in high school. Maybe my fingers grew bigger.
Due to my aversion of taking my electronics over international borders, I went on vacation a few years ago with a flip phone (LTE still), and found that T9 was too inconvenient for even basic logistics, so got a secondary Android phone after that.
It was really expensive and was impossible to get at launch. The optical zoom was a nice touch but I didn't really care for the weird aspect they have.
It's wonderful to have a small phone.
It's not a "flagship" but it is fully featured - nothing spared - and half the size of my palm. The screen is just small enough to be too annoying to do anything really distracting on. I have gotten NOTHING but compliments on it since I started using it a month ago (on a reco I picked up here).
How does it compare to the palm phone PVG100, usually available for 1/3 of the price? (new but in OEM box)
It seems much thicker.
Also, which network are you using?
https://www.unihertz.com/blogs/news/about-at-t-usage-in-the-...
> Recently, AT&T released a whitelist of smartphone brands that will continue to work on their network after February 2022. Unfortunately, Unihertz products are not among them.
I hope someone sues AT&T for its discriminative policy.
Then just get a PVG100, it supports all the features as it was made for this network!
(Unfortunately I am personally looking for something in between this and today's "phablets".)
I'm a happy user of Jelly 2 for a half year now and I bought it for this single reason. It's fully featured so you can do anything, but the screen is so small that you do it only when there's a real need, so I'm not wasting time staring at the phone for no real reason.
Cons: My co-workers make fun of me :)
Edit: formatting
Typing is much easier than you would think. With swipe typing it's almost at par.
I also use bitwarden for passwords, so the main thing I type without swype is the passphrase for bitwarden, and proper names that autocorrect will then proceed to change to the wrong thing afterwards anyways (just like a big android phone).
These are top of the line phones, but they're very solid. Unihertz is making some good devices.
Size profile is basically the same as an old school Blackberry. No problems with it.
Love the idea of the IR remote. I miss that from my PalmPilot.
So years and years ago, when my main phone was a Nokia N900, I would occasionally walk into phone stores and see what was out there out of sheer curiosity. One day I saw an HTC Wildfire S, and I fell in love with the form factor right away. Unfortunately, I never bought it because I had my N900 and it was just too damn useful to justify giving it up for a cheap Android phone, and to this day I regret not buying one. It was so small and so cute and I wanted it, and now even if I do buy a used one on eBay it'll just be a glorified brick because it doesn't have LTE and no apps will run on its ancient version of Android. This is the closest thing I've ever seen to the HTC Wildfire S since... I think I actually will buy it, at least as a backup device.
Pros:
- Battery lasts for 3 days with my usage (browsing when not at my desk, whatsapp, a handful of calls, android auto)
- Rugged / waterproof (IP68)
- Fits nicely in your hand
- 48 MP camera - not as good as Pixels, but good
- Good dual SIM setup
Cons:
- Thick; probably mostly due to the battery. Doesn't bother me, but if you wear skinny jeans and carry your phone in your front pocket it'll be noticeable
- Just got Android 11
- The built in walkie talkie is something of a gimmick since it chews up battery in standby/monitor mode. I thought it would be a useful backup since we live in the sticks w/o reliable phone signal. Get the Atom L instead
I had an original Jelly but battery life was miserable.
Except I'm on AT&T pay-as-you-go for $30/month so I don't even look anymore.
Just be aware the the Wifi often drops and battery life is 1.5 days at best. But again, makes it really easy to not do anything distracting on it lol
The reason I switched back to my Samsung Galaxy is because I changed job and will need to use it for work, and frankly the Jelly is just too small to be efficient.
It is otherwise an amazing little phone.
I then upgraded to an iPhone SE, but miss Android apps like Termux, PDANet, and MiXplorer. iOS lacks compelling alternatives: A-Shell, iOS-Socks-Proxy (running in A-Shell), and Apple Files + Readdle's Documents are decent, but don't measure up to the aforementioned Android apps.
All that makes the Jelly 2 an attractive choice. It ticks the essential smartphone boxes but discourages excessive use (doom scrolling, Instagram, TikTok, Hacker News, etc).
Yeah, not going to happen - people in general are NOT going to pay more for a smaller phone. Even the iPhone mini is cheaper than the full size models.
I finally have a small phone again, and I’m liking ios.
Dreading the day I'll have to start searching for a replacement :(
Your point about bezels getting smaller is very true for the phones you mentioned. But you also left out the Pixel 4a 5G, the Pixel 5a, the Pixel 6, the Pixel 6 Pro, and the Pixel 6a. Which all ballooned massively in physical size relative to their predecessors.