The hard reality is that there is no PAYING market for such a device, because when it comes to the point-of-sale, most people still choose the normal-size device with better screen/battery/camera.
This is equivalent to something I called the "QWERTY paradox" more than a decade ago:
Back when the Smartphone market exploded, people disliked typing on a touchscreen and repeatedly stated that they want a device with a physical keyboard.
There was plenty of evidence, surveys, market studies, trend predictions, devices for these "Messaging-centric" use-cases were always part of this market-demand roster.
But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.
Every major vendor went through this cycle of learning that lesson, usually with an iteration like "it needs to be a premium high-spec device" --> (didn't sell) --> "ah, it should be mass-market" --> (also didn't sell).
You can find this journey for every vendor. Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, Sony.
The same lessons were already learnt for small-screen devices: There was a "Mini" series of Samsung Galaxy, LG G-series, HTC One, Sony Xperia. It didn't sell, the numbers showed that it didn't attract additional customers, at best it only fragmented the existing customer-base.
Source: I work in that industry for a long time now
> when it comes to the point-of-sale, most people still choose the normal-size device with better screen/battery/camera.
My theory is that much of this effect is an error, or at least a far-less-than-ideal effort, on the part of the designers. Of course it’s hard to sell a low-end “mini” device with a worse camera, worse battery life, etc. But that’s not actually what I, or many people I discuss this with, want. I would happily buy a premium device that is short and narrow, and possibly even thicker as a tradeoff. There’s plenty of unexplored room in the design space here. For example: start with an iPhone Pro or whatever the Android equivalent du jour is. Keep the camera unchanged. Shrink the display but keep the same quality (at least equal pixel density). Now puff out the back so that the camera lenses are flat or even slightly recessed. Use the resulting added volume to compensate for the decrease in volume due to decreasing the other dimensions. Market the think as a Whatever Phone Pro Compact, and advertise clearly that the battery life is every bit as good as the non-Compact model version. Show off cool pictures models sticking this thing in their cool jeans pockets without them sticking out. Charge the same price as the ordinary Pro model.
As far as I know, no one has tried anything like this in recent memory. The iPhone 12 and 13 Mini were always marketed as the cheaper versions, and the cute little old SE model was very much a low-end version. Last I checked, there was no 5G Android device with similar dimensions from any manufacturer.
The Jelly Max looks really tempting, but I'm a little apprehensive after running the Jelly Star for a while and dealing with constant dropped calls and bad call quality all around.
> The iPhone 12 and 13 Mini were always marketed as the cheaper versions [...]
No, they were not. They were literally a scaled down version of their respective regular sized counterparts, the 13 Mini had the same cameras, SOC, memory, screen quality and storage options as the regular 13 [0], yet its sales success (or lack thereof [1]) was enough to instantly cure me of any previously held notions that there is a sufficiently large group of buyers for these devices out there.
It isn't because the specs are inferior, the cameras are changed, the display has a lower pixel density (the Mini actually had slightly higher ppi) or anything else. There simply is no sufficient market, the 13 Mini was the worst selling phone in that generation by a frankly impressive margin. 38% for iPhone 13 vs 3% for iPhone 13 mini, despite them being as close to just being scaled down and otherwise identical as one can make a phone speaks a very clear language that any manufacturer wanting to succeed has hear loud and clear. Most certainly why Asus has seized with their more compact smartphones. The amount of people I know that praised Asus for making a more compact flagship with a very large battery [2] was not in any way proportional to their sales. In this case, the battery life was actually superior to many larger competitors. Same for my Xperia 5 V, the compact phone I bought and used at the time, cause I walk my talk and have been following phone releases to a sufficient degree that I can assure everyone, there have been and are flagship speced, compact phones with good battery life, that no one ever buys. I'd love more options in the market, heck, I use both the Xperia 5 and an iPhone 15 Pro Max in a Clicks case, either for different situations, so am on both sides as a consumer. Simply, the lack of any actual market demand beyond online comments makes that impossible, we need to be honest here.
For a while, I was optimistic that Apple would at least continue to release the SE every 3-ish years. I'm guessing they wanted to finally kill the fingerprint reader and other SE-specific features[1]. And maybe even the SE with its reduced price didn't sell that well.
---
1. Yes, I understand that these features were present in other phones, but the SE was the last phone actively sold by Apple that had them
It's simpler than that. People often don't know what they want until they're actually presented with the buying decision. Economists call this stated vs revealed preferences and it's a well documented and understood phenomena.
A bunny walks into a bakery. There he asks the baker if he has any carrot cake.
The bakers says: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’
So the bunny leaves, but returns the next day. He once again asks if the baker has any carrot cake.
Once more the baker answers: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’
Once the bunny left, the baker started making a carrot cake thinking the bunny would return the next day for the cake. And so the bunny did, and he asks: ‘Do you have carrot cake?’
To which the bakers answers: ‘Yes, today I DO sell carrot cake.’
So the Bunny says: ‘YUCK, isn't it disgusting, why do people sell these things?!’
I've seen this pattern before, with laptops ("I want a laptop with" specific spec+feature combo not in the market) and cars ("I just want an electric car with physical controls and no subscription services or extra electronics") immediately coming to mind.
Which is a shame, because I can sympathize with most of these requests.
I want something like Kick-starter which operates the same way but isn't meant for funding the creator to get the upfront capital investment - just avoiding existing companies getting burned out of the "let's listen to a niche slice of our customers instead of appealing to the masses" mindset. Companies put up a weird product proposal and see if enough people will commit to buying it to at least break even.
Then, if there's enough of a commitment, those people get something they actually want. If there's not enough, then there's a specific reason that you can point to to explain why.
This is almost equivalent to the normal market model (people buy things they want, and niche products don't get made much), except with a more explicit feedback step, to help people realize that if they don't actually put their money where their mouth is, then things won't get made.
There's probably a better way to do this, but I'm not sure how. Ultimately I just want my non-electronic electric car.
Unihertz is currently serving both the slim size and the QWERTY niche, with a QWERTY Kickstarter running right now. Their hardware actually seems quite appreciated, but they don't seem to care much for software updates.
Currently, foldable smartphones (the flip phone ones) seem to be the fashionable alternative to small phones, but they're even more expensive than the huge ones.
Every time I see messages and posts like this, I hope that big companies were being dissatisfied with the product factory scaling issue and device sell effectiveness.
I hope that small companies would launch device like this with 500-1000 devices being created and sold in a year just fulfill the niche and doesn't go bankrupt
I don’t think you could manufacture a small run like that without the price being extremely high.
Say you charge $1,000 per device. That means you need to build an entire company, pay staff, and prototype then manufacture a custom hardware device with customized software with less than a million dollars. Costs add up real fast.
Why does the cost need to be so high? Chinese markets have many small phone options like Soyes and Servo that cost less than $100. Unfortunately, these devices are potentially loaded with malware.
Can a similar device without malware not be made in small batches? At a selling price of $500 or less?
I actually had a brief email conversation with the folks running the project in the OP. Basically they said they can't get a reasonable-quality screen in that size. No one makes it. They would have to spin up a whole new manufacturing line for a quality, small screen and the cost on that is insane. The screens on the small phones you're talking about are very low quality.
> But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.
I bought Motorola Droid 4 when it came out. I was so desperate to have a new phone with physical QWERTY, that I bought it blindly, even though it wasn't available in Europe, even though I have never seen it, even though I knew it *didn't support mobile networks* in Europe for a few months, to be fixed by an update. I had to use a coworker who was going on vacation to Florida.
When it arrived, the first thing I saw was that the black screen during boot shines bright blueish, horribly bad contrast. Then when image appeared, I've learned that it has two subpixels per image pixel, for efficiency. This made single color areas show the pixels very visibly.
Then I took a photo. The quality reminded me of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone I had 6 years back, except the colors were much worse. Everything was blueish. It had a physical (touch) "search" button below the screen, but companies like Google didn't seem to understand why it would be useful to search for anything, so most of their apps didn't react to it. Especially Gmail.
But hey, I could touch-type any long message, and I could use SSH client conveniently (it even had a physical CTRL button).
Other than the keyboard (pretty solid too), it was one of the worst phones I ever had. So yeah, based on that model the market decided that "nobody wants keyboard phones", and the Droid 5 never came out.
Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.
> Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially
Well, there was BlackBerry. Multiple phone vendors assuming they could refresh a previously world-dominating form factor with contemporary smartphone guts only seems unreasonable in hindsight.
Even if was a small % of the Apple lineup, the iPhone mini was one the best selling smartphones all brands considered. I for one switched to iPhone in 2020 specifically because there wasn't a single current-gen small form-factor Android phone anymore. I have a few friend that also made the switch with the 12 / 13 Mini for that reason.
The real reason the iPhone mini failed is not related to screen size, it's because its segment was canibalized by the cheaper alternative, the SE. The 2020 and 2022 sold like hot breads, wherehas their screen was almost an inch smaller than the iPhone mini. This is the proof that there a significant market for people who don't care about size and would gladly take the smallest option at a $100 discount from the regular one.
I think the "mini" name hurt it too. People thought it would be small, when the screen was in fact bigger than the screen on the 6/7/8 iPhones. It was a similar form factor without the forehead and chin.
The mini could have been simply, iPhone. The marketing would have been that they managed to add an extra .7" of screen, while reducing the overall size and weight. That's a great pitch. Who doesn't want a bigger screen in something that more easily fits in their pocket? Instead they called in a "mini", people thought it would be tiny and hard to use, so they didn't buy it.
The iPhone 12 mini screen was only .1" smaller than the screen on the iPhone 8 Plus... the giant option from just a few years earlier.
The mini was a marketing and brand strategy failure, plain and simple. It wasn't a small phone.
> Even if was a small % of the Apple lineup, the iPhone mini was one the best selling smartphones all brands considered
Correct. To back this up a little bit with numbers, the iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold about the half of the rate of the entire Google Pixel lineup. I bet lots of phone manufacturers would love to have half the sales of Google's premier Android phone. I also switched from Android to iPhone solely because of the 13 Mini form factor (I prefer Android, but I prefer a human-hand-sized phone even more).
This is the case for me precisely - I’ve been dismayed at the “phablet” sizing trend, and leapt at the opportunity to keep my iPhone reasonably-sized - I’m on my second SE now and I’m kind of dreading what will happen when I need to eventually replace it.
I just want something small that will fit comfortably in my pocket, and I can use with one hand.
I owned 2 minis and would just replace screens and batteries whenever one got bad. Keep one in a drawer, take the broken one to the shop, rinse repeat.
I did this for years because I liked the form factor so much.
My new buying criteria for my iPhone is simply “buy the smallest one offered”.
But I’m willing to accept I’m not a big enough market segment to move the market.
The SE is a great phone, and a reasonable size. I will say ever more websites are starting to screwup their layouts on such "small" as indeed is iOS. Tiresome as hell
I'm starting to see the same trend with laptops without a keyboard now. There's an entire generation of 8-16 yos who never used a keyboard and type fast on ipad screens. In a decade, it's a real possibility that keyboardless laptops become the standard...
Ha yeah it isn't a big screen by today's standards. But it was basically a full candy-bar slab (with a curved screen) plus a sliding keyboard body, making it particularly thick / chunk.
Kind of funny, I would've thought it was heavier, but that is less than an S25 Ultra in weight... I think that also speaks to how large screens have gotten!
> The hard reality is that there is no PAYING market for such a device, because when it comes to the point-of-sale, most people still choose the normal-size device with better screen/battery/camera.
This kind of over-generalization is always annoying me deeply.
Of course there IS a market for such a product, because at the very least I exist (as well as a good fraction of the 320 other people from HN who upvoted this submission so far).
The problem is that this market is tiny, and even a smaller share of this market is willing to make massive concessions on other aspects of the phone to have a smaller phone, so you end up with a much harder design space (because size is a big engineering constraint) for a minority market, and the endeavor is often not profitable enough for that reason.
It doesn't mean there's no market, it just means addressing this particular market is a tough business, these two statements aren't equivalent.
This here in is one of the major differences between Apple[0] and the rest. I imagine they had similar data at various points, and chose to deliberately ignore it. I can’t say for sure but I imagine they thought through the actual end user and experience and realized the tradeoff is more than worth it
[0]: when Steve Jobs still ran the company at least
Exactly. Stated and revealed preferences are sometimes very different. Interestingly, preferences can also change slowly over time. For example, the Dell Streak in 2010 had a 5 inch screen size, which was considered ridiculously large at the time (people called it a "phablet"), and it didn't catch on initially. But years later, average phones did actually reach and even exceed that size. Nowadays the Dell seems relatively small.
> the numbers showed that it didn't attract additional customers, at best it only fragmented the existing customer-base.
So, it did sell, but at the expense of larger phones. Which means we are not offered this because it's a bit more profitable for the smartphone makers to only offer larger phones. Extremely annoying.
The "mini" versions of phones (even the ones marketed as premium) always seem to be nerfed in other ways, like battery life, camera quality, or performance, which could explain why they inevitably don't sell. Nobody really offers a balls-out premium small form factor phone that is better than or equal to the flagship big-phone.
That was the iPhone Mini! Same internal specs as the regular iPhone, smaller package, roughly same battery life. And it's gone because no one wanted it.
But that's just physics. With a larger area, you can be thinner while still having more of all those things - dominated by battery volume dictating most of them.
My cynical take is that small phones don't exist because they are not the product. Similar to vape pens the product is the addictive substance the device loads. In this case its apps and ads. A smaller screen probably negatively impacts KPIs on many levels, at Google/Apple/Meta/X and on down through the ecosystem.
I understand that Apple did not make enough money to make it worth their while to continue the iphone mini line. However, it does seem like there is a profitable business for someone there given how beloved it was/is.
I only traded out my iphone 12 mini just recently for an iphone 16 pro (likely the last apple product I will ever buy but thats another story) and aside from the camera it is basically the same. Just heavier, awkward to hold and slightly worse designed.
No major player wants a smaller screen because it has downstream impacts on the pipeline of addictive material and ad pixels they can stuff into ocular nerves.
What was so odd was how Apple fumbled the iPhone mini launch by launching the iPhone SE first. At that point there hadn't been a small phone for a few years, There was pent up demand. The SE came out and it was a big success, lots of people wanted ti because it was a small phone.
Then few months later they launched the mini expecting it to sell even more or something. Somehow they missed that everyone that wanted a small phone had just bought the SE, and it just wasn't long enough for them to be worth upgrading to the much better mini.
Had they waited for a year to pass the mini might have done much better because those who wanted a more powerful phone could find an excuse for an upgrade after a year, less then 6 months, not so much.
This is my take as well. I bought the SE 2nd gen because of its size, a longer support cycle, and granular app permissions on iOS. It was my first iPhone and has probably been my last when its time is due.
My phone isn't some entertainment device, it's a utility tool. I don't need it to be "smart", it should be useful on the go. The persona sketched by GP just isn't me: Messaging, maps, weather, 2FA, and calculator come first, email (read only) and news feed second, the camera is a third for documenting purposes (if even, I'd rather take my full frame). The easier it is to carry this thing around and the longer lasting its build quality, the better. Why would I pay almost double (USD 699 VS 399 on launch) for a less robust mini with sharper edges?!
If Apple were to continue the offer of rehashed designs from previous generations (preferably with rounder edges) for a SE line, limit its dimensions to never go beyond 140x67.5x8mm, and make it last for solid 5-year release cycles, then count me in as your most loyal customer. As it currently stands I'm looking out for a small sized phone from any manufacturer. I would even lower my expectations on support cycle and build quality quite a bit (if reasonable priced) before I'd give in on the size.
I've been an iPhone user since late 2007. I current use an SE 2022 and love it.
I've gone iPhone -> 3GS -> 4 -> 5s -> 6s -> 7 -> SE 2020 -> SE 2022.
The Mini never interested me. I love the SE. I love the home button and TouchID. I love the traditional size. If I want more I have an iPad Pro (12.9" original 2015 model bought in 2015 -- the battery still lasts 2 weeks with my usage pattern) or M1 Mac Mini with a 32" 4k screen.
If they don't make a new SE model I don't know what I'll do. I guess, firstly, get a new battery for it before it's out of the support window. Maybe sometime next year. And then see how long app updates support whatever the last OS version it will run is.
The ONLY thing I'd change in my SE, if it was possible, is more than 4 GB of RAM. The latest models have 8 GB and the others at the time the SE was sold already had 6 GB.
With recent system updates I'm getting a lot more of applications restarting when I switch back to them. This is mostly not a huge problem, except that the X app loses your place in the "Following" stream if you're more than a few hours behind and the app reloads.
I'm still using a 13 mini, it's fractionally too large, I think the original SE is perfection.
Regardless, battery life is horrendous now, and it's starting to lag and fail so when the new ultra watch is released I'm going to replace my phone with it.
Getting the battery replaced fixed mine (and seemed to mildly improve system performance, although maybe that’s placebo), might be worth a shot if you like the form factor.
Depending on how degraded the original battery was it isn't necessarily placebo. If iOS detects a severely degraded battery it will clock down the CPU slightly to cope with it, sacrificing a little performance to keep the device stable.
With 3rd party batteries it can't do this, so it doesn't (I think, will admit I'm not entirely sure exactly how iOS deals with 3rd party batteries it can't determine the status of), and if you replaced it with an official part then it would have been in good condition, so regardless which road you took, it's possible that you went from a state where the OS was clocking down, to one where it wasn't anymore.
The problem is not the battery, it's the battery, processor and price.
The iPhone 13 Mini made up around 3% of total iPhone sales, so there's clearly a market for compact, mid-range phones ($600-$700). You can manufacture them in China or India for somewhere between $250 and $400, depending on the battery, camera, and overall performance.
The real challenge is that the retail price of a mid-range Android phone can't go over the $500 mark. People in developing countries are always stuck trying to balance quality with price. And for $500 bucks they expect a prime phone nowadays.
it has a few dings on the frame and I'm not especially attached to the form factor more significantly I am addicted to it and need a viable alternative.
I love my iPhone 13 Mini. Its only issues are battery life (now), and non-competitive camera. I'm personally happy with the photos it takes, but then I look at my girlfriend's shots and get FOMO.
While I doubt it's economical, I'd love a small, simple phone with juiced up camera. I'd be fine with worse battery life as external batteries can remedy that in a pinch.
I have a 12 mini, it's about as large a phone as I'd want. I wish the back and/or bezel were a little "grippier" as the phone as it's made is so slippery it almost demands a case, but that adds bulk.
Unlike many it seems, I don't care much about the camera. I'd probably want some sort of camera for scanning QR codes, or snapping a quick photo of something I want to look up later, but otherwise I don't take photos or videos on my phone. I don't use any social media on my phone other than text messaging. This makes the smaller battery size/capacity a non-issue.
Since Apple no longer makes a reasonably-sized phone I'll probably go back to Android after this one dies or becomes unsupported.
I also think it's silly to carry a $1,000 device around with you everywhere, so a "premium" small phone is probably a non-starter for me. My favorite phones were the ~$200 Moto-G phones I had before I got the iPhone (it was a gift).
Your theory makes sense until it falls apart if you consider SE and Mini as the same category of small iPhones. If the only reason why Mini failed was bad launch time, then why haven't Apple launched anything small (SE or Mini) after 2022? Isn't 2024 or even 2025 the perfect time to launch an upgrade for SE or Mini? They now have enough data since the last launch of a small phone.
The problem is that people who want a small phone prioritize the size.
Most of them don't care about the premium features of larger phones. So the Mini was a weird niche within a niche. Small phone with premium price and features.
The Mini and SE2 were virtually identical in physical size. For the 16e they should have used the iPhone 12/13 Mini body and the 13 Mini screen. Use the 15 Pro SoC with 8GB memory, and the 15 camera. Sell it for an SE price. Now you have fused the small phone and budget iPhone markets.
I can confirm, that Apple my misunderstood the market:
I was eager to buy a new iPhone because I just finished my masters degree and started a new job, had a bit of money and than the SE2 launched. My 5s or SE1 started to age and as an beginner app developer a current phone was important. I was so happy because I could not see my self using one of those bigger phones even though the SE2 was still bigger than my 5s/SE1. A few months later the mini was released and my initial reaction was "OMG this is THE perfect phone, but I just got a new one... i can not afford to buy another one".
I don't know. I think the SE was there there to generate services income (Apps, Apple Music, etc.) from people who wouldn't buy an iPhone otherwise. The design was intentionally very stale to avoid cannibalization of their flagships. I don't think a lot of people who bought flagship iPhones before would go to an SE. Imagine going from an iPhone X or XS to an SE, it's a big downgrade. People were not buying the SE because of the size, but because it was cheap (the iPhone 16e that is the cheaper model now, has the same size as the 16).
My wife, I, and several people I know had iPhone 12 or 13 Mini. Their battery life was pretty terrible and word soon got out it was. I think this was in the end what killed it for people who are normally buying Apple flagships and were considering a Mini. It was very hard to get through the day with a Mini.
Besides the abysmal battery life, I think the market for small phones is maybe simply not there. Samsung keeps around one smaller model (base S-series) and arguably the Z Flip is a smaller model (but persistent hardware issues). If there was a large demand for flagship-class small phones, I am sure some Android manufacturers would make them.
They could have made the SE large but slow (instead of small and slow) and avoided all cannibalization future and present.
My hypothesis about the supposed non-existence of the small phone buyer is that they very much do exist (personally, haven't bought anything other than whatever was the smallest Xperia at the time in more than a decade), but that this group has little overlap with the group willing to buy for list price on release day. But the perception of success of a given phone is very much dominated by the latter, the long tail of buyers isn't really seen. Even if the release day premium over mid-lifecycle street price (in countries where price fixing is not allowed) goes to the retailer and is of very little interest to the manufacturer.
Manufacturers should just move compacts to a three year cycle and forget everything about hyper-optimizing desirability for the kind of buyer who spends too much time reading questionable review sites.
I’ve never had battery issues with my mini. But then again, I just want an unobtrusive tool. You can make a lot more money selling phones that are targeted to compulsive/addictive “whales” than you make selling normal phones for normal people.
You’re way too cynical and have let your cynicism cloud history.
The first phablets were probably the Galaxy Note line starting in 2011 which was met with some skepticism due to the size of them. These were well before the edge to edge screen days. So you had 5.7 inch screens with a bezel.
They were huge but I would routinely see small women pull these things out of their hand bags and press a device that obscured almost their whole face and start chatting.
Things steadily got bigger from there. The general population WANTED this.
Parent's take is not whether bigger phones shouldn't exist, it's why smaller phones stopped being produced, which is a fairly different angle.
> women
To note, the initial smartphones were already too big for he taste of many: a clamshell feature phone was almost a third of the size of the original iPhone. From that POV, going to a phone that is twice as big is less of a barrier, as they had to keep it in a bag/purse in the first place.
The return of foldables is also pretty well received in that regard.
Just tonight, I saw a friend of mine, pull a new foldable Razr from her purse.
They are cool phones, but I do iOS. I still use a 13 Mini, and will continue to do so, for quite some time.
As to the point of this article, I seem to recall a couple of very small Android phones, some years ago (about credit-card sized). I guess they didn’t sell well.
I don't think so. Yesterday I was browsing phones and there was a Google Pixel 9 Fold on dislpay, closed and showing something. That has a display on the outside and a foldable display on the inside.
I opened it, and most of the screen looked like a big, roundish black blob of ink, centred on the fold, on top of the Android animations working perfectly underneath, but only visible at the edges. I was impressed that the rest of the screen around worked perfectly, but it was unusuable due to the size of the black blob.
Something had broken at or near the fold while it was on display.
All other devices were in great condition; it was a well-maintained store.
IMHO this is just not viable in the current world.
I agree with line the article sets (5"4 for 1080p, almost the size of the Pixel 4a), as mainstream apps will properly work at that size. I still have a working 4a, and some banking apps are getting pretty cramped for instance. And many websites already need furious panning and zooming.
A credit card size phone would only work for people who basically hate their phones I think.
>A credit card size phone would only work for people who basically hate their phones I think.
Probably. It's people who know they have to own a smartphone for so many things like park their car but don't really want one.
This was a number of years back but I know a then tech executive who got a phone (I think it may have been a feature phone at the time) only because their nanny absolutely insisted.
Completely agree. Although not even on "small phones", my S23 isn't small but the design of these apps has regressed so much that I barely see any useful information.
On my old WAP phone I could see bank balance and maybe the last transaction or two. Now half the screens taken up with upselling account levels, invest in shares, buy crypto, you've been pre-approved!
It's the padding! And the UX teams that add them into the designs!
My cynical take is that an unholy pact was formed between FE devs and UX designers:
By adding in "design" and "user experience" you essentially reduce features, complexity and general "dev time" of every single user-screen or page or component. They're no longer cram-packed with oodles of features, toggles, buttons, menus, etc. Most pages are glorified lists of things, with maybe a menu on each item if you are lucky. Devs dev less, have less bugs, just use FE-library of the day and go home happy because they made a CRUD screen essentially.
Meanwhile, UX designers get to play around and constantly fiddle with design because let's all be honest, nothing will ever be truly good and in a perfect "user experience" space because complexity and functionality are never what the user is happy about having, until they need it.
Apple did a horrible job marketing the mini. I ran into a lot of people who saw my 12 mini and said they would prefer that size, but didn’t know it existed.
When I went to buy it, and the case, the employees at the Apple Store questioned me and tried to push me toward the normal iPhone. This is the first and only time I’ve ever felt Apple Store employees steering purchasing decisions. I had to go in there knowing what I wanted, and had to assert that it was what I wanted repeatedly.
Are people buying big phones because they are addicted to their screens, or are people addicted to their screens because of big phones?
When I went to buy it, and the case, the employees at the Apple Store questioned me and tried to push me toward the normal iPhone.
Probably because they knew that customers would come back to complain about the abysmal battery life of the Mini? I had a 12 Mini, I loved that phone, but man was it hard to get through the day on a single charge.
I generally only charge my 13 mini every other day or so.
The only time I recently struggled getting through the day was when on vacation and constantly using google maps & translate. But that is with a 3 year old phone.
Worth noting that (so I've heard) the most impactful hardware change between the 12 mini and the 13 mini was improvements to the battery life. I've never struggled with the battery life on my 13 mini, either, but the handful of people I know with a 12 mini have always bemoaned it.
13 mini here, also not charging every day. My screen time is around 2 hours a day, which IMO is still to much. I try to keep battery between 20 and 80 percent.
> The general population wants larger phones because they are addicted to their screens.
I would rephrase that to: The general population wants a larger phones because phones are defacto PCs these days. They can watch movies, browser the news, listen to music, FaceTime, Maps, ..
Outside of business applications likes Word / Excel, phones basically handles 90% of people's requirements for "computers".
Yes, and people are using their phones for what they previously used TVs, laptops, music players and other dedicated devices for. It's a bit of a cycle.
There's also the accessibility factor. Many people become farsighted later in life. It's much easier to see things on a big phone, especially with increased zoom. (I see this all of the time when I fly.)
The other problem is that more and more content now is designed for (or only tolerable on) larger phone screens. Go to any website these days on a smaller phone like an iPhone mini and more than 50% (being charitable here) of the screen will be taken up by garbage like ads, cookie banners, popups, etc.
It's a vicious cycle. Phone manufactures make the screen bigger, app and website developers realize they can cram more junk on the page, consumers demand larger screens as a result, return to step 1.
Ironically, I have the opposite problem with website design. So many sites are clearly designed for mobile screen sizes, with a teensy-tiny strip of text on my large monitor. It's very unpleasant to read lines of text that short, so on a lot of sites I have to go into dev tools and set the text width to 1200px to make it an actual comfortable reading experience. I should not have to mess with CSS to make websites readable, but here we are.
This is HN. OP is 100% right to be flabbergasted that people on this site are not using the best and brightest of the ad blockers available. I know I am.
I’m not sure if your comment is sarcastic, but in case it isn’t: my friend group had a get-together two days ago, three out of six had a laptop with them, and it even came in handy when I started talking about the problem I’m working on, somebody got interested and I was able to show the plots and calculations. Also we have PowerPoint Parties somewhat regularly, where most of us bring their computers to make last minute changes or simply have a known environment.
Not sarcastic at all. I have never seen people (not even my nerdy friends, least of all normies) bring laptops to a friend hangout. People might bring laptops if they were getting together to work on stuff, but then that isn't just hanging out any more, there's a purpose to the gathering. I would be astonished if someone could show that non-techy people ever brought laptops when they would hang out. Techy people (like your friend group), maybe. But not your average person.
When I was still working full-time, a co-worker told me their kid had told them they didn't need or want a computer. Probably changes at some point with long writing assignments, etc. but still.
I do increasingly think about whether I need to bring a laptop on various trips. It can be handy but I try to pack light and another few pounds is a lot for me. I've experimented with a newish tablet but it's a bit too in-between for my taste.
I remember people would always be surprised about how home computer ownership was not that high but smartphones (well, Japanese "garakei") were were ubiquitous.
Well, do you think this is a good state of affairs? On one hand, phones are pretty accessible devices, on the other hand there are many aspects of phones that are objectively pretty terrible for consumers (talking about cost and difficulty of repair, walled garden ecosystems, and generally being geared towards consuming things and a lot less effective at producing them than laptops and desktops.)
(Tangential: of course I don't blame anyone for bringing their phone with them everywhere but if you're going to go to a friend group hangout, consider how annoying it is when you're trying to talk to someone and they're clearly checked out browsing some slop on Twitter or talking to someone else entirely. Take a damn break from the phone!)
I want larger phones because I am at that particular stage of middle age where I should probably start using reading glasses, but I'm also damned if I'm going to start carrying reading glasses everywhere with me.
I’m even older, walking around with reading glasses on my head all day. Had an iPhone 13 mini, miss the form factor, would prefer a mini as my next phone. But for most mobile use, on the couch, watching videos, etc, I use an iPad, not my phone. For me a large phone is mostly a tablet that’s too small.
Yeah and I also remember how Apple fans said "this is ridiculous, nobody needs a screen that big that doesn't fit in your pocket easily", and here we are 15 years later mourning the iPhone Mini/SE.
10 years ago, if your phone was bigger than 5 inches, it looked ridiculous. You'd pull it out and people would look at you like you'd just escaped from a nut house
I am 6ft tall and feel like my hands are above average in size. I have a regular iPhone 16 pro. I still don’t understand how people use bigger devices.
Do they like using two hands? I can’t single hand a phone any larger without having to shift it in my hand.
I don’t want to use two hands on my phone outside of typing.
I just refuse to accept that the first phablet I ever saw, the Galaxy Note, which covered the person's face and looked absolutely comical in their hands, was smaller than my current, very regular-sized phone.
Smaller phones has always been limited in performance, batter life, the app support and the camera quality. Camera is the most important factor and battery is the second.
General population doesn't buy phones every year and they don't want a nerfed phone when they have to pay 500-1000 $/€s. So they gravitate towards higher end ones.
Companies including Apple has always treated the small size as an entry to mid segment phone. The only exception I know is Sony z3 and z5 compact which suffered heat and battery swelling issues due to Qualcomm messing 810 series SoCs up.
Companies also want you to buy the most expensive phone. So they market the premium models and train their store personnel to sell more of the premium line. If they stop intentionally nerfing the smaller phones, I think there is a market there. However, it will still be smaller.
I used to lug a dedicated camera around all the time. Except for special purposes I just bring a phone these days. And I'm not the only one. I do know people who do a lot of nature photography but I also know people who always had a camera with them who now reserve them for "serious" portraiture and things like that.
It helps, but less than you'd think. The main board's power doesn't dramatically change, and because the full space under the screen isn't battery, reducing the screen size by 40% might cause the battery size to be reduced by 60%
The Samsung Galaxy Note (the first one) had a screen size of 5.3 inches.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 had a screen size of 5.5 inches. I had one and regularly had strangers ask me if that was really a phone. I had friends say, "Give me a call on your tablet" as a joke.
I loved it. Now my 6.1 inch iPhone feels on the small side.
The Dell Streak (shoutout to the other 3 people who bought one) had a 5 inch screen in 2010, a notable jump from contemporary phones like the iPhone 4 which was still 3.5", and other Android devices like the HTC Droid series which were around 3.7" and slowly starting to creep upwards to differentiate themselves from the iPhone. I think the largest Android devices you could get at the time were still smaller than 4".
I remember Dell showing this off at the All Thing D conference and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal asked the Dell spokesperson to put it up to his head, and told him it looked like a waffle. To this days it’s all I think of when I see someone holding a massive phone up to the side of their head.
That thing could really stand out in a crowd. I was at a baseball stadium for a concert that year, and spotted someone with a Dell Streak as I was heading down to the field. In a sea of people that was the one phone I spotted. I stopped to ask the guy about it briefly.
I remember Steve Jobs berating phablets as "the Hummer of phones" and dissing 7-inch Android tablets as too small, and disparagingly saying users would need to "file down their fingers" to use them - without considering how much smaller Apple users' fingers would need to be to use 3.5-inch iPhones.
I also remember the viral, doctored image showing the reachability of phone screens which "proved" that 3.5 inches was the "ideal" phone size.
It's amusing how people try an memory hole their negative reaction and pieces written about the Note. People's mocking web pages have disappeared. Arguments based on the size of the human hand completely forgotten. The very notion that a 5.7 inch screen is big an unwieldly is now met with disdain.
When I first saw the ad on tv, my reaction was "Holy moley, wow, who's going to buy that monstrosity?"
And then a few weeks later I bought one. All the guys in my office laughed and said "Wow, look at that huge thing, it's ridiculous". I chuckled and agreed, though I was quietly enjoying the larger screen.
This is the part that frustrates me. Apple keeps introducing software “solutions” for hardware problems. Reachability, Screen Time, Focus Modes, etc. A smaller phone naturally solves most of these problems. Small phones act as more of a utility device for when you’re away from a proper computer. This is all I want my phone to be. I really think they got it right the first time in 2007.
I ended up switching from a 13 mini (I had the 12 mini as well) to a 16 Pro. I was having a lot of battery life issues, and kept running into apps that clearly didn’t fully test with the smaller screen. I also really missed having a telephoto lens.
My phone usage went up; my laptop/desktop usage went down. I don’t like that. Compared to a normal computer, a phone is still worse in almost every way, other than mobility. It’s just now tolerable enough to put up with more of the time. I’m writing this on the phone, it would have been easier on a keyboard and mouse.
"Small phones act as more of a utility device for when you’re away from a proper computer. This is all I want my phone to be."
You, like me, are not representatives of a market phone manufacturers are interested in. Utilitarian and minimal use only sells one phone every few years.
They are catering for the overwhelming market that spends upwards of 5 hours screen time per day, watches movies and TVs, plays games, and generally spends as much time as possible on them, with as much payment and ad revenue as that comes with on top of the original device sale.
I always personally liked the idea of computers being fixed, or semi-fixed (like a laptop), as a place to work or study, and then leave once that is done. The replacement of computers and laptops by tablets and phones is a wider cultural shift from computers being tools and productive technology to entertainment and consumerist technology, in my opinion.
This was the internal debate I was having with myself. I bought the 13 mini the day the 14 was released and saw they were killing the mini line. The goal was to keep it until it was literally dead, replacing the battery as needed. The battery of the 13 mini was supposed to be better than the 12 mini, but that was not my experience.
The battery also wasn’t the main issue, just a contributing factor. I was ok using the battery as a signal for when I was using the phone too much and taking it as a signal to reevaluate my usage. Seeing software bugs related to the screen size, as figuring that would only get worse now that new phones didn’t come in the smaller size… that’s what made me think I might as well get the transition over with.
I’ve had battery issues with the 16 Pro, but those are software bugs. Some days my phone will give me a low battery warning by noon. I end up killing all the apps, charging it up again, and then it’s fine. It’s happened about 4 or 5 times, but I haven’t been able to tell what’s doing it.
The 13 mini didn't solve any of these issues for me plus the worse battery life. I upgraded to 16 pro max. My laptop usage also went down from there. Total screen time probably stayed, but now i carry most of the time just a phone instead of phone and laptop. If you want something less addictive there is probably the apple watch but you still need the phone to configure
and now you're strapped to a device 24/7 just for the sake to be used less.
>No major player wants a smaller screen because it has downstream impacts on the pipeline of addictive material and ad pixels they can stuff into ocular nerves.
There are lots of phone manufacturers who have no ads business. They just make phones so why would they care?
Size is dictated by trouser pocket size/handbag size and usage. Editing photos and movies to upload onto social media is probably better on a big screen.
Also screen size is dictated by common panel sizes, as low volume will mean a higher price.
Folding screens and iPad Mini's existence suggests people want larger screen real estate.
I think photos are a big deal, but IMO it's more about the photo quality. And if you put a nice fancy camera on the phone, suddenly the device gets pretty expensive.
And so while there are people who want "small screen + nice camera". There are people who want "small screen + small price". There are many people who _don't want the small screen_. So you have this phone that can cost a lot of money (in a pretty messy market where most phone models seem to not make money anyways), and you're going to cut off chunks of the market?
So we end up with small screen + shitty camera and specs etc. And people here who want a small phone (but really want a small phone that isn't miserable to use) still are unsatisfied.
I have an iPhone mini, and my understanding is that I lose quite a bit of battery life also by not having the full sized version. The market definitely prefers long runtimes, free from frequent charging, while I need to carry a charge pack sometimes, although just when I expect it to be needed.
> There are lots of phone manufacturers who have no ads business. They just make phones so why would they care?
There are still bound to the screen resolution dictated by the platforms/environment. A maker selling an android phone with a 480x640px screen
would face a huge uphill battle to see any sales.
Going for a smaller physical screen means higher DPI, so higher production costs and quality control issues. It can make more sense to buy cheaper, low DPI screen and make the whole device bigger to match the needed pixel count.
Agreed. I'd prefer a modern iPhone the size of an iPhone 4, it was perfegt. I made the same "upgrade" from 12 mini to 16 Pro, and the 16 Pro is so large and heavy. Feels like we're moving backwards in time.
For... well, most people. Half of people are women, so I don't know how they do it. I'm a man, with man hands, and modern phones are not one hand operable. You need two hands. Even if you can do a particular operation with one hand, the phone is unsteady and it's awkward.
I think people with large hands are definitely the minority. So, we're not optimizing for hand size. We're optimizing for engagement, I think.
It was observed a long time ago on HN that women, with their tiny hands, loved huge phones - since they were using small phones two-handed anyway - and it was the men who complained that small, one-handed phones stopped being sold.
You don’t speak for most people. You can only speak for yourself. The feelings of “Most people” are clear as demonstrated by the market; they not only find large phones fine, they find them preferable.
> modern phones are not one hand operable
So? I mean for me they are so it’s irrelevant, but what should it matter if they are not? The market obviously does not share your interest in devices to be operated in such a manner as a priority or something of particular importance.
That being said, it’s of course unfortunate that if that is your preference, that nothing in the market caters for it. Your preferences and wants are obviously entirely valid and it’s a shame there is no interest even from a boutique vendor in meeting them.
I have plenty of preferences for products that are not catered too, as I am sure is true for us all and of course I don’t love it, but I must live in the reality that the larger market doesn’t always want what I do.
> We’re optimizing for engagement
The market is optimizing for what consumers asked for, which was larger devices. You say I am in a minority, I claim equally that you are in a minority as well.
At 193 cm in height, I have large hands too. I currently use a Zenfone 10 and a Galaxy S10e before that, and I can grip them both just fine in one hand, but I can't also control them with that same hand without awkward contortions and a reliance on gravity.
The only phones I've had that I could comfortably use one-handed were my old BlackBerry Q10 (2013) and BlackBerry Classic (2014). The Q10 because it's short enough to hold between my thumb and ring finger such that I could use my index and middle fingers on the touch screen (slightly unorthodox but it worked really well), and the larger Classic because it has an optical thumbpad and excellent software support for it (it was so good I rarely used the touch screen at all). And both had physical keyboards.
I don't have especially small hands and I can't stand my Nokia XR20 (which isn't even close to the biggest phone out there). If I can't reach every corner of the screen with my thumb while holding the phone, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant to use. Sadly that is most phones these days.
Just like 16e, Mini and SE were meant to push up the sales of their "other" phones. Otherwise they would not have had both Mini and SE. I mean it was a joke.
But Hanlon's razor and the way Apple has been on a screwing up spree of late I doubt it was anything intentional. They f'ed up knowing not what to do at all. They don't anymore.
The margins are also worse, which is way, way closer to a manufacturer’s bottom line than the software ecosystem.
There is demand for larger phones, yes, but manufacturers also charge more for bigger devices and most of that is margin. Following their own logic, they also charge less for smaller phones.
If your customers are sticky, then many of the people who buy the smaller phone would have otherwise bought a bigger phone for more money. Introducing a smaller phone brings down profits.
Bigger equals better consumer perception, I imagine driven in part by the top-tier phones being larger to fit additional battery capacity in for the higher performance processors making all larger devices carry some premium cachet.
> I only traded out my iphone 12 mini just recently for an iphone 16 pro (likely the last apple product I will ever buy but thats another story) and aside from the camera it is basically the same. Just heavier, awkward to hold and slightly worse designed.
Just did the exact same thing 5 months ago.. I still miss my 12 mini. Would strongly consider buying a 13 mini instead of its even being sold anymore.
i have a 13 mini. Its beat up, battery life is getting worse (even though I rarely use it) and both cameras are smashed (in my pocket during a motorcycle accident), but I look at all the options now and figure I'll just keep using this one. I'd rather be using an iPhone 4, but I need some stuff that that one didn't have to work with a glucose monitor.
I ended up replacing my 12 mini with a 6z flip from samsung. The only real annoyance is that Apple hasn't enabled RCS for Danish telecom companies yet. Well that and sand... We'll see how long it lives though. The reason I originally went to apple was because my first smartphone (a galaxy 2) sort of did the planned obsolescence thing exactly the same way my two buddies galaxy 2's did at the time. If the flip lives for 5ish years then I'll likely never go back to apple. Unless they make a phone that will actually fit comfortable in my pockets again.
The little half screen on the flip is useless though. Basically nothing works on it.
FM radio uses the headphone cable as an antenna, so with the move to bluetooth I assume it got squashed for similar reasons. The other aspect is it assumes if you want live radio that you're happy needing an active data connection and allowance, any any local stations have a stream available. One of the things I love about streaming (via RadioDroid, etc) is that you can get a station from anywhere on the planet but sometimes you want something a bit more basic.
I posted a bit too late and didn't see your post first, which more or less is exactly along my thinking.
Modern phones are sold (even at profit) with the intent that there is more payments/ad revenue coming down the line, for movies, TV, games and web browsing/social media. A big screen makes that experience better for people and advertisers. It's a cynical take, but the entire business model is based on building and promoting addiction.
They have no interest in selling phones for utility purposes only, even though that's largely how they advertise the phones, because advertising a 5 hour plus daily screen time isn't sexy at all.
I feel that the problem with small phones roots in software. Obviously you would need to run smaller resolution. My sweet spot was iPhone 4S. It has 3.5" display with 640x960 resolution. If you would try to run modern Android with this resolution, you would hit multiple obstacles, from popular apps to popular websites scaling badly.
I think most major players have the same incentives and minor players don't have the economies of scale to make it work economically.
Also the longer I used my iphone mini and the rest of the world moved to comically large phones the more it became apparent that nobody is thinking about small screen form factors in design and when they do its only around ad placement.
But, for example, what is the money flow from google/advertising in general to Motorola, that makes them not want to release a small screen model in their lineup of cheap phones?
Instagram, Tiktok, and Google have gotten users addicted to consuming content, and larger screens help with that.
We are helplessly addicted to digital cocaine, and so we demand large phones, and so motorola will not make money selling a small phone.
It's like the parent said: our addiction is the product, and so just like a chain-smoker will say "I want to quit" as they buy 5 packs a day, a modern smartphone user will say "I want a smaller screen and to look at ads less" as they hopelessly buy a 10 inch phablet and can't go 5 minutes without pulling it from their pocket to check tiktok.
It is not that the money from advertising flows, it is that the addicted users have already been ruined, and will not buy the devices they say they want.
Sure, but that's something totally different. Basically just "customers don't want it and won't buy it". I understood the root comment to imply some kind of more direct incentive: "A smaller screen probably negatively impacts KPIs on many levels" - if advertising KPIs are supposed to be given precedence over demand from consumers there has to be at least some kind of mechanism for it.
"No major player wants a smaller screen because it has downstream impacts on the pipeline of addictive material and ad pixels they can stuff into ocular nerves." -- what is the direct (or indirect) pressure that the major players can exert over some more or less independent hw manufacturer like Motorola? I'm not saying it's impossible, it reminds me of e.g. the situation where (pre iphone) carriers blocked phones from having wifi because they wanted them to be dependent on their network, but if something like this is happening it should be possible to roughly point out how.
I think the other thing is pretty much everyone has a smartphone android/ios, and so the rev model has changed for android its youtube/movies, and for ios its apple tv.
I don’t know.If I have a “big” phone (anything bigger than the iphone mini, at least for me), I’ll leave it at home most of the time. But if it’s small, I’ll take it with me everywhere. So I can be bombarded with crap more time if I use a small phone.
Phones are big now because people want better cameras and longer battery life. Also, people are spending 4-5 hours more per day on screens than they did 15 years ago, so they want bigger screen for reading, playing games and watching videos.
I know I can’t claim to be “the norm”, but all I want is a smaller phone with 1–2 day battery life. I don’t need a better screen, a better camera, or ever more compute. (It’s a freaking smartphone, not a game console!) All I need my phone to do is run a web browser, messaging apps, maps, my banking app, and random little apps some organisations force you to use – like my university’s app, my city’s public transport app, or half the restaurants here. Things that could easily be done with 10–15 year old hardware. Sadly, the industry chose to keep the power consumption constant increasing while computational power, instead of focusing on smaller devices and longer battery life with the same power.
Again, I’m not angry that current phones exist; I’m just sad there aren’t (good) alternatives – at least that I know of.
Yep, in my area a couple of dining places only list their menu in an app [1], a bunch of places have some kind of membership program accessible through the app, and one standup club requires (!) an app to order drinks and food.
[1]: There’s a paper one in the restaurant, of course, but I like to choose beforehand.
Couldn’t we make it thicker though? The rumored iPhone air is the exact opposite of what I want. Give me a thicker phone with a smaller screen and I’d pay Pro prices for it.
Thicker things don't fit in pockets as well, they're unwieldy.
I've gotten my EDC down to 1 leather ID sleeve with my credit card and drivers license in it, and my phone. This is probably still thicker then it should be, but it's soft so I don't feel the bulk or edges.
This is it, for a while battery life got worse for a while with more powerful chips. But then Samsung goes full in on the big size 6"+ phone and it got better again.
Now even at 80% original capacity, a Samsung can still last me throughout the day given that I am not watching videos constantly. The Iphone 6 back in the day would go to 40% in 3 hours, then suddenly to 5% in minutes.
Plus most people replace their laptop with a phone now. So the big screen size is a must.
That’s how I see it. Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen fits better battery life.
It’s an interesting take but I believe most people just prefer bigger phone. I know it’s weird to those of us who like the opposite and funnily enough it’s often women who have gigantic phone, which they can’t put in their tiny jean pocket.
I don’t explain it and every time I get explained they like it better because it’s got bigger battery and bigger screen, I just don’t understand how you could live your life with a brick constantly on you but it’s what people want.
The market just adapted to the demand and it’s not a 40k « petition » that will change much.
> I know it’s weird to those of us who like the opposite and funnily enough it’s often women who have gigantic phone, which they can’t put in their tiny jean pocket.
Most women carry their phone in a hand bag anyway as the pockets on most pants for women are way to small either way [1].
The pants thing is another baffling mystery. I know exactly zero women who want their pants to not have pockets. Yet manufacturers absolutely refuse to add pockets. It seems like a complete market failure.
I mean, are the phones themselves really making money off ads or are those totally separate companies? I don't disagree that this brings in business, but I don't agree that this is a significant motivator in terms of phone sizes
I thought the theory behind the 12 and 13 minis was that Apple had a huge surplus of parts that they needed to offload, and making the minis was a profitable way of doing that.
Pointless rant. Apple does not earn more or less depending on how many ads it can show.
The market has spoken, it's not worthwhile for Apple to produce small phones.
There are a million companies that are not Google that could also produce mini phones and don't for the same exact reason: most people want large screens to enjoy videos and photos.
Nobody cares about small screens and pockets, everyone holds their phones in their hands or purses at all times.
Like it or not, Apple keeps cancelling smaller phone lines because they don't sell well. That's it. If they sold really well then they'd keep selling them, but they don't.
I would also love more capable small phones personally, but I can't deny that people overall don't seem to want them.
Phones had smaller screens when you needed the keypad to interact with the largest number of features.
Phone screen sizes grew as the applications that could use screen space grew in demand.
People are watching 1080p films on the train now. The people who want smaller screens are usually willing to deal with a larger one. People who want larger screens usually cant operate their use cases on a smaller screen. Larger screens also tend to mask larger case meaning less miniaturisation required for the components.
None of this explains why it's just impossible to get small phones.
You have people who want them unusably large and people who want them to fit in your hand. The solution in every other market is that products are manufactured to fit both sets of needs. You don't see pants coming in one size with the advice "wear a belt".
>You don't see pants coming in one size with the advice "wear a belt".
Great example. Because people who are shorter than average tend to have to get pants taken up, and people who are vastly taller than average tend to go to specialty stores.
The average height of pants is largely dictated by what the market will permit, requiring people to make adjustments or leave the market. Having a 2d matrix of height and width defined pant sizes is too complex for the market to bother with.
Technology is worse, anything that requires tooling is done the least number of times possible. While small phone enjoyers are disadvantaged, they arent disadvantaged enough to force them out of the market. Larger tooling is easier to make and caters to all other preferences.
> Technology is worse, anything that requires tooling is done the least number of times possible. While small phone enjoyers are disadvantaged, they arent disadvantaged enough to force them out of the market. Larger tooling is easier to make and caters to all other preferences.
No, you're making up a claim that you know perfectly well is false. Just blank most of your day out of your mind, and then... what? Why?
You don't like pants? Televisions come in dozens of different sizes. Laptops come in dozens of different sizes. Are phones different in some way?
Phones come in dozens of different sizes too, what are you on about? TVs come in a greater range of sizes because they're designed for different viewing distances and room configurations. Phones don't have this variable, you hold them in your hand.
I don't think it's meaningful. There are not enough people who would buy such a device to make it profitable to design and manufacture. Your priors -
"You have ... people who want them to fit in your hand"
Are incorrect. The number of people who will actually buy small devices is ... small. The number of people who are so interested in small devices they'll overlook things like a lower battery life and whatever other compromises are needed to achieve the smaller size, likely even fewer.
It's not like it hasn't been tried in the past, people in this thread talk about iPhone minis disappearing - Apple couldn't make them a success. Sony couldn't make them a success either and stopped making them AFAICT. As a market segment you're too small to warrant the investment in designing a small flagship. And if nobody's investing in a small flagship, small midmarket isn't going to happen either.
There do appear to be niche manufacturers in this segment (take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/smallphones/). If the untapped demand is so huge, I would expect to see them become much more mainstream over time.
Unless you're asserting the number of people who will actually buy small devices is zero (which I would hope you aren't given the evidence to the contrary in this thread), his priors are in fact correct. If there exists any number of people willing to buy small phones, then the statement "you have people who want them to fit in your hand" is true.
I used to buy ZenFones, but they're huge now. It feels like there's some combination of poor sales and parts commonality that causes the problem, not a shadowy conspiracy, since I don't think ASUS and other manufacturers have a significant way to benefit from phone addiction.
Out of curiosity, why's it your last Apple product?
Watching lots of Louis Rossmann has put me almost ideologically against Apple (even though they design great hardware and smooth UX within their ecosystem), but I'm not good at forming coherent points to present to Apple loving friends.
For me so far, I think it's about control over what I buy - but the rebuttal is always "you're buying a product from them, if you don't like it then tough".
The opinion I got from Louis's content is that in a sense he is right, but also almost every brand is even worse. Apple does pretty much nothing to help 3rd party repair and sometimes actively impeeds it, but most other tech products do that while also not even having 1st party repair options.
I remember when Samsung had removable batteries, I went in to a Samsung store to buy a replacement for my S5 battery and they told me they didn't sell them, only new phones. Meanwhile I can take my iPhone in to any Apple store and they will replace the battery for me.
So yeah Apple does need to be forced to massively improve their practices but so does pretty much the entire tech industry aside from a few small projects that focus on being repairable.
I just don't see the value add anymore and the company appears to have lost its product vision and the design sensibilities are slipping. Apple is controlled by a geriatric board and a logistics expert and it shows.
I feel I am more frequently encountering software bugs, vaporware,(dESiGnEd fOr ApPle InTelLiGeNce), and ridiculous "innovation" (genmoji). I feel the hardware advances are not very relevant to me, I don't need VR or augmented reality. I want a computer to get out of my way and solve problems for me so I can spend time in plain old reality. The hardware upgrades I DO care about are ridiculously overpriced (Ram upgrades are abusively expensive).
While I prefer my computer to be a tool to get a job done and don't want the computer itself to be a hobby. I also do not want to be forced to use AI. I also dislike the rent seeking and toolbooth behavior of iMessage and the App store. Now that linux has more paved paths, things increasingly "just work" and hardware has basically caught up I don't see a good reason to support Apple's non-vision with my money.
That’s cool, but you represent a tiny slice of the market that as devices get more powerful, isn’t addressable in the low volumes needed to make you happy.
When the chips needed to make a phone are priced like toys, maybe you’ll find the product for you.
What Linux computer can you buy with the battery life, quietness, lack of heat and speed of a modern ARM based Mac?
Battery life, probably none. For the rest it's pretty ok now - I recently got a ThinkPad T14. Performance-wise it's in M1/M2 territory and yes the fans can spin up, but they are not very loud.
I have used MacBooks since 2007, but I have started using the ThinkPad more and more. Why?
I put in 64GiB RAM and a 2TB SSD and it cost me almost nothing. The laptop plus these expansions was 1400 or 1500 Euro, a MacBook with 64GiB RAM and 2TB SSD would cost me 5000 Euro. When the battery has had its time, I can replace it by removing a few screws. I added a PCI cellular modem. The expandability and maintanability is just great.
Even though the GPU in my MacBook Pro (M3 Pro) blows away the ThinkPad's GPU on paper, the ThinkPad with Wayland actually renders everything super-smoothly on my 120Hz 4K screen, while on the MacBook the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable. On the ThinkPad I can run NixOS, which is generally much nicer than macOS.
The primary thing that my MacBook has over my ThinkPad are battery life and a bunch of really good Mac applications like the Affinity Suite. But since more and more applications are switching to Electron, it has become less of a problem. Heck, I even have 1Password with fingerprint unlock, etc. like if it was a MacBook.
As far as phones - your alternative is to buy an Android phone with an operating system by an ad company that is also pushing AI just as hard.
Or I don't know, you buy a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and you have better privacy than on an iPhone? And no F1 movie ads too.
I think there are a lot of offerings out there now. Maybe not to the minute with respect to battery life but Apples chip advantage is steadily evaporating. I typically don't need more than 8 hours of battery personally.
Have heard good things about framework computers. As a more efficient chip or battery comes out you just upgrade that component if your use case requires it.
Most people don't really need more than 2 hours of battery life anyway[1] as their laptops barely ever leave the house. >8H of battery is nice to have but it is really an important parameter for a specific population while for others it is just convenience. I wouldn't trade an OS/desktop I don't like over my linux setup just because it last longer when I never need more than a couple of hours on battery[3].
[1] which means you need a 4 to 6h range when new if you don't plan to replace the battery too often
[2] students, construction companies, people who are always on the road...
Is that where we are going? Most people don’t need a laptop that has more than 2 hours battery life?
When I was in the office full time in the bad old days, you would be in a conference room and every one would plug their laptops in.
After I started working remotely and still doing business trips, one charge could last a full day either going back and forth between conference rooms, in “war rooms” etc and no one with M series MacBooks even worried about charging.
Heck my MacBook Pro (work laptop) can last a full day on power with my portable USB C powered external monitor where the power and video come from one cord.
By the way, it's not a lack of heat in the Air. The M4 will hit 105°C and start throttling pretty soon in sustained workloads. At any rate, modern Ryzen laptop CPUs have narrowed the gap with Apple Silicon performance-wise. It's mostly battery life that's still lagging behind. It not only requires a mainboard optimized for power use (which is pretty good nowadays on modern laptops), but also very strong OS integration. I am not sure if non-Apple laptops will get that far, because Linux and Windows simply have to target much more hardware.
At any rate, non-Apple laptops have other benefits, like being able to get 64GiB/128GiB memory and large SSDs without breaking the bank.
In the end it's all a trade-off. If you are a sales representative that needs all-day battery life, MacBook is probably the only option. If you are a developer that needs something portable to hop between desks or on the train, but usually have access to a power socket (yay, Dutch/German trains), a few hours of battery is enough and you might prefer to get an insane amount of memory/storage, a built-in cellular modem, and an ethernet port instead.
I'd sacrifice some battery life to have a Thinkpad (example: T14 gen 5), with the superior keyboard, Touch point and smaller touchpad (the Mac one is annoyingly too large).
I have stopped caring so I caved in to work policy and got an iPhone, and I really do not see the point. It is just a thing no better or worse than an Android...
That makes no sense. The only phone companies that make money from how often you use your phone and buy apps on it are Apple and Google. If there were a market for it other companies would make them.
As far as the mini phones - because physics - the battery life is atrocious. That was one of the main drivers for me to get a larger phone. Well that and because I can pull down the Control Center and use the widget to make everything on my phone larger and still be able to use it without wearing my glasses. With my glasses, I keep everything the smallest size
Sorry, in my national market. Apple has 51%, Samsung has around 28% and Google 5%. These 3 hold almost 85% of the UK market.
Samsung, from what I remember used to side-load tons of apps (some alongside identical stock Android apps), so it's in their best interest to maximise screen time through media apps, which generally work best on a bigger screen.
It's against all of these companies interests to sell you a phone which you quickly use and put away. They all have every incentive to keep you staring, because they're all getting extra money from every ad you see in a game, TV show, movie, web browsing, or wherever else they can slot it.
I thought that was the case but I tried going small.
I owned an iPhone 13 mini. Basically the perfect small phone if there ever was one.
The downsides are extensive and the upsides are few.
- Battery life sucked. Since a phone is a 3D object making it bigger substantially increases battery capacity. It also makes packaging difficult especially if the goal is a flagship-quality phone. Good luck fitting in good hardware with a lot of features.
- Eyestrain. It’s small.
- Typing. It sucks. The phone is small.
And it turns out the upside of one-handed operation is limited. A simple PopSocket or OhSnap! will make large phones easy to use in one hand.
Plus, if pocketability is your issue, you can buy a folding phone like a Motorola Razr and still get a nice big screen when you pull it out.
I disagree. I'm reading and typing this from an iPhone 13 mini. I use a big one for work so it's not like I don't know what I'm missing. I very strongly prefer the small form factor
I have a 13 mini and a case with a built-in 6800mAh battery. Without the case, this phone is low battery half way through the day. When watching videos, I do feel like 5.4" screen is a little bit small. Overall happy though. I wanted a smaller phone.
6" doesn't register as small to me at all lol. The HTC 8X was 4.3" and that was a "normal" sized phone for me.
I used the Palm Phone (PVG100) (3.3" screen) (basically the size of a credit card) [ https://www.ricklohre.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/dsc_097... ] as long as I could until it became too slow to use as software got slower and increasingly battery-hungry and I had to give it up last year.
The specs are more than strong enough to handle whatever I need on a daily basis. But I miss the slimmer size of the Palm Phone.
Right now I've pre-ordered this phone https://aiphor.com/products/bluefox-nx1-4-0-android-smartpho... with the 8gigram+128gig storage capacity. Has an even stronger cpu than the Soyes, but I am slightly worried about the resolution of 540x1168px because some elements may end up overlapping.
Even though it's 4", it has a tiny bezel so it's only slightly bigger than the Palm Phone, although a bit thicker cuz of a bigger battery. But still relatively slim, especially compared to the Soyes.
Huh, for some reason, this page loads properly and I can see it for 1-2 seconds, but it seems like as soon as it's done loading, it redirects me to google.com. Based in Spain, so guessing it's their way of turning away EU or European customers I guess?
They seem to be doing stuff by countries, probably due to regulations. The phone has existed in China for a bit already and only recently became pre-orderable in the US.
For me, screen size is what matters. Because I'm using screen. Small bezel is very bad thing, because it registers accidental touches now. Best phone in the history of mankind was iPhone 4S. Perfectly balanced. It's all went downhill since then.
Thanks for all the interesting links, the bluefox-nx1-specifically looks interesting to me. Do you have any information how are handling the new EU law, which requires 5 years of security updates? https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...
I have no idea, I don't work for them or live in the EU. But given that other users report problems loading the site, maybe they don't support EU customers. The phone exists in China but only started taking pre-orders in the US, so maybe it will change in the future.
I, too, used a PVG100 until it died. The "juicepack" battery doubled the thickness, but it still fit in my pocket. Now I've got a Motorola Razr. I figure the only way companies will give me a small phone if it folds.
I tried out the Razr and Z Flip 4 at a store but I thought they were too hard to use while closed and way too big when open.
If you check /r/smallphones I'll post a review of the NX1 in a couple months (or whenever I get it + a week or two). It looks like the closest spiritual successor to the Palm Phone (although the single button on the foot with multiple actions will probably never be beat)
The Soyes S10Max performs fine with 8 gigs of ram and a slightly slower mobile CPU. The most intensive thing I do on it is probably video call with people on FB Messenger or Telegram (or I guess load TicketMaster, but even my gf's expensive iPhone struggles with that one lmao), and it does that fine.
But I'll write a review on reddit once I've used it for a week or two.
No clue on aiphor.com, webdevs (or their managers) love javascript lol
I think performance requirements depend on what it's used for, and what other devices you have access to in your life. If someone only has one phone as their personal computer for everything then I can see an argument that the minimum should be higher, but if the phone is intended to be comfortably pocketable tool for tasks you're likely to need while away from a larger/more powerful device. For example have the phone to handle calls, simple messaging, taking photos (minus editing), transport/store apps, and a full PC or larger phone/tablet for ticketmaster.
The only other option that I've toyed with is buying a small feature/"dumb" phone for going in the pocket and a smartphone in a bag, which seems less ideal.
>If someone only has one phone as their personal computer for everything then I can see an argument that the minimum should be higher
Yeah for those people, they would need a beefier phone. That's certainly not me, I have devices at home. In my case, a pure dumb phone isn't of much use to me either, I make maybe one or two phone calls most months, but I've always used my phone as more of a borderline feature phone.
>a full PC or larger phone/tablet for ticketmaster.
The problem with ticketmaster is that you need to use it at the events themselves. Most events no longer use physical tickets. But a stronger phone or tablet won't help you here. Even on a high-end phone, ticketmaster will somehow forget to store your login information while you have poor network connectivity due to tons of people in the area, even if you try to load your tickets ahead of time to avoid the issue (although somehow they always deliver ads!). Everyone complains about ticketmaster's fees, but the app is the worst part.
They seem to work fine on T-Mobile. I hear the Palm Phone had some issue with Verizon where it only worked as a "companion phone" and I hear AT&T limits what phones are allowed somehow, but I cannot speak to those things.
They only have 4G rather than 5G. This has not bothered me but perhaps it would bother others.
Number one factor for me when buying a phone is how long is it going to last. I mean durability, camera quality, os updates. Will I still want to use/be using it in 5 years?
I cannot justify $700 as much as I _really want a smaller phone_. But _maybe if it was built to last_ I would be the customer and I would tell all my friends.
Currently use a Pixel 7a because it was cheap and OK. I was debating the iPhone 12 mini but it was already a little old, and I prefer Android.
I suspect, if others are like me, that those who want small phones also just want something that works and is a little minimal - not necessarily all the power best camera etc. To be clear, I _don't_ want one of those minimalist dumbphones, I want _a smartphone_ that's small Do y'all feel the same?
Propose a $500 small phone that's OK on specs but LASTS.
Yes. The iphone se was basically the exact thing I wanted (and previously the moto G series). It doesnt seem like apple wants to continue to offer the product line.
I was hoping that the foldable phone market would fix this, but instead of making normal sized (huge) phones that fold into half the size, they made tablets that fold into normal sized (huge) phones!
I'm writing this on a Unihertz Jelly Star which is tiny, and I consider it my "protest phone" at the lack of decent small phones.
A friend jokingly calls it my "microphone", another a "prison phone" (due to its size allowing for more easily smuggling in body cavities). Occasionally I go to mobile phone shops and ask if they have a case for it just for the fun of seeing the look on their faces when they see it (I don't actually want a case, and in fact it came with one which I threw in the bin).
Personally, I couldn't be happier with it.
Only problems: they don't do software updates; camera is poor; non-OLED screen.
In an ideal world I'd have a slightly bigger phone, but not too much bigger. I've grown very fond of this phone.
The lack of updates/general software sketchiness is what has me turned off from the Jelly. I know a product like that never has a chance in hell of running Graphene, I’d be way more interested if it could run Lineage.
The Jelly Max is 5" (so bigger than previous Jellies, smaller than mainstream phones). I'd strongly consider one except for their lack of software updates.
The Jelly Star's battery life is surprisingly decent for its size - I get about 8 hours of moderate use, but it requires a mid-day charge if you're using GPS or watching videos.
Is OLED burn-in really something people still care about? I have a handful of OLED devices, some of which I've used daily for nearly 10 years, and none of them have any burn-in. I've never even seen burn-in on anything other than a signage TV, and that happens even on some LCDs.
> I've never even seen burn-in on anything other than a signage TV, and that happens even on some LCDs
AFAIK, the hardware still suffers from that problem, but it's been fixed in most devices by software fixes. Instead of displaying the exactly same content 24/7, it has "cleaning programs" or similar to runs once in a while to prevent the burn in from happening. Our OLED TV does the same I think too.
Of course, and many devices also use various pixel shift techniques. My point is that this isn't really a drawback from the user's perspective. Saying "I consider non-OLED to be a selling point because it won't burn in" simply doesn't make sense anymore.
I got the iPhone 13 mini as a work phone for the sole reason of it being the smallest iPhone at the time. I too dislike the phone landscape nowadays with their ridiculous and ever increasing sizes.
My personal device is a Motorola Razr 50 Ultra, which I got because while it's huge when flipped, it's portable enough when it's closed. I can have it in my pocket without it falling out.. without it being annoying while i put on shoes etc...
I use its cover screen a fair amount too, to avoid having to flip it open, which is also why I got the ultra rather than the slightly smaller version.
The iPhone 13 Pro -> 16 Pro upsizing is ridiculous. The 13 was just the right size, but now they had to change it so they could sell more cases. It's almost phablet-size now. Look at an iPhone 6S by comparison.
The iPhone 13 pro is 71.5mm x 146.7mm x 7.65mm [1] and the iPhone 16 pro is 71.5mm x 149.3mm x 8.25mm [2].
While it did get a tiny bit bigger I wouldn’t have noticed this u less you would look up the spec, especially as it got lighter from 204g [1] to 199g [2] at the same time.
The best phone I ever had was a Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact. I would still be using it if it wasn't too slow to run modern versions of android.
This is one of those things that just makes me feel so out of touch with the rest of the world. Does everyone else have giant pockets and giant hands? Does everyone use their phone with two hands and carry a bag everywhere? Is it just a trend like small phones were a trend before smartphones? Why do people want these giant phones?
I never ever use my laptop anymore outside of work. I never surf the web, read, order stuff etc from my laptop. It’s basically useless now if I don’t code or use pro apps. So a bigger phone is confortable because some websites suck on smaller screens and using an iPad is too big sometimes
Been happy with Sony Xperia 10 series, which is similar width, but taller as tallness really do not annoy me. Also massive battery. Sadly they are going to stop selling those here, so I might just need to go to Samsung next year...
As a guy in 36" waist jeans (yeah I need to lose a few kg)... I can fit an iphone 16 pro max in my pocket pretty comfortably.
> Why do people want these giant phones?
Well, one reason is that I'm getting older and don't find it as easy to read tiny text on tiny screens any more. Another reason is that I sometimes watch streaming services on there.
I saw a post on this subject in the android subreddit back in 2019 [0] and it was clear that everyone had already accepted by then that the market was too small to sustain this. I too loved Sony's series of compact phones - the XZ1 Compact is still one of the best phones I've ever used.
It is only going to get worse. Most of us who were young adults when the iPhone was announced are in our 40s now, and presbyopia is a real thing. In a few years my daily QOL will be better served by a bigger phone and I suspect many people around my age are feeling the same thing. The "small electronic accessory I bring around" niche will be filled by smartwatches.
Same, I am a 13 mini user and will probably stay this way until there is a realistic alternative. It's obnoxious that there isn't a single phone on the market where you can reach the top corner with one hand.
Likewise. The 70-something percent battery health isn't the best (and the phone lags like crazy), but the other day I realized it's still a bit smaller than my 2015 Moto G3 (that I still use, though only for basic tasks).
If you are interested, Unihertz launched the titan 2 and it's pretty nice, but no waterproofing or wireless charging are big issues for me.
I’m still rocking mine! Gonna start looking for second hand ones soon as the home button is starting to die, and that’s the best bit.
I found using the browser is a good enough alternative for many apps, and it also makes them less addictive because they aren’t as slick. Particularly handy for work apps.
I’m still using as a secondary device, but the battery was never the same after I replaced, and the touch id/home button doesn’t work anymore, so I have to use that virtual home button.
I ended up getting a newer SE (2022), but I miss the first one.
For me, it would be the Samsung Galaxy S5 but with modern hardware.
In addition to being small, with SD card and 3.5mm jack, it is water resistant and has a removable battery. It is also one of the most robust non-hardened phones. It has an IR blaster too if it matters to you.
It was a time when Samsung was known for its gimmicks, the one for the Galaxy S5 is "Air View", where it recognizes your finger hovers over the screen. It is actually a good one, because it supports the "hover" targets in web pages!
Most people find it ugly though, and I tend to agree, but if you use a case, like most people do, who cares what the phone inside looks like?
I've held on to my S8 as long as possible, because even if the battery wasn't removable any more, it lasted the lifetime of the device, despite heating up considerably during the summer.
My current Xperia 5 maintains battery temperature around 10°C above ambient during fast charging and since it easily lasts the whole day in the 30-80% charge regime, I believe it will outlast other components.
As someone who often checks that sub, all I can say is that there's no decent small phones and it's just people constantly checking whether one has been released yet
Fully agree. Mine has broken recently and I needed to buy a new phone. The S25 I have now is not much bigger, but even that small difference matters much.
Though 120Hz screen is nice.
Since Google is about to brick my Pixel 6a with the battery botchering update, i find myself in the same struggle again i had when buying the 6a.
Basically you have to make compromises on performance and camera and then this was, what i came up with:
- Zenfone 10 (flagship with prices still above launch price (!), which soon gets no updates anymore)
- Unihertz Jelly Max (small, but thick and bad camera)
- Rakuten Hand 5G and Rakuten Mini (also bad camera and older Android)
- Balmuda Phone (which i really like, but also bad camera and discontinued, so probably not even security updates and no custom rom support)
- Bluefox NX1 (really tempting, but appearantly kind of bad build quality and no NFC)
All other options are even older phones. Samsung S25 line does exist, but i really like vanilla Android.
I think the price chart of the Zenfone DOES somehow indicates the existence of a market and i wonder if it would be big enough for a small niche player!?
Personally I am considering a pixel 8, which is the "smallest" of current phones, but it still really isn't small. And i don't see myself as a Google customer because of the battery topic...
I personally would have been more happy had Eric made a small android phone instead of the new pebble, but hey...
I got a Pixel 8, and it's not small, but it's reasonably sized. About the same as the Moto G7 I replaced, much smaller than my kid's current Moto G Power. The good thing about the Pixel 8 is that you can run LineageOS on it, which was the main thing that determined my choice.
I want a thick clunky device without a screen that can run for 4-7 days without charging. Then i want 1) a normal size device, 2) a tiny one and 3) a tablet. These should be terminals, little more than a screen, a battery and some radio to communicate with the herefore mentioned brick that does all of the heavy lifting. It needs only 20-30 meter range. The brick may also feature a webserver captive portal with public bluetooth and wifi access.
What you need is a power bank. Then you can charge your phone, or any other device Why do you need multiple days? Charge your devices overnight. Get a fast charger that charges in minutes if you forget or are out. There are power banks with builtin chargers.
Also, if you want really small device, I found smartwatches are nice adjunct to phone. Can check notifications and do basic things on watch instead of pulling out phone. The watch uses phone for data, but there is no point in terminals when smartwatch chip can handle that. There are watches with LTE that work without the phone.
Except that the screen and the radio are 80% of power usage, so this doesn't help anything. For what most people do with their laptop/tablet/phone, the little bursts of CPU are effectively "free" — increasingly cheap with each process shrink! — while the IO is as expensive as ever.
To be clear, I meant that, when running your average (i.e. mostly-idle, not-very-graphically-intense, yet smoothly-animated) interactive-UI application, with the CPU+GPU module needing to stream vaguely-realtime updates wirelessly over to the display module, the display module would end up using nearly as much battery to receive and display the updates as the CPU+GPU module would be taking to generate and send them. It would be a negligible cost for the display module to just do the rendering itself.
Playing games or using the CPU+GPU module as a media server is a 1%-of-the-time use-case. If you want this architecture to not need a lot of battery in the display module, it needs to be low-power for the 99%-of-the-time use-case: scrolling a webpage.
(This is basically the classical thin-client / fat-client paradox: thin clients save on power right until you want them to do anything continuously. Then the IO costs outweigh the hypothetical costs of localizing that continuous CPU/GPU activity by pushing it down into a fat client.)
This resonates strongly. The Pixel 7 is my current holdout due to its 'acceptable' size, even though it's not exactly "mini".
It's a shame to see manufacturers like Asus move away from compact form factors, as I'd have been an immediate buyer for a smaller ZenFone.
The market's push towards larger devices is making e-ink 'dumb' phones increasingly appealing for me.
Man this hits home. I'm a reasonably sized human, but there are almost no devices on the market outside of iPhones where I can reach from bottom right to upper left with 1 hand without shifting the phone around in my hand. I hate it.
I'd be willing to take less battery life to get something like this, but nearly everything that's anywhere close either has no NFC (which means mobile payments are out the door) or doesn't have 5G or just has such an awful camera/processor as to be basically unusable for many every-day tasks.
Not only is it not a very small phone, I can't even properly type this message one handed. It's also not a good phone which I regret purchasing.
Zenphones until the 10 had easy to unlock bootloaders, leading to long in official support by the community. However with the 10 ASUS stopped that tool and they've been lying ever since that they're still working on it.
My zenfone is now on its final major android update, the rather minor android 15 version, and I've only got two years of security updates left until I need to look for a new phone. That's one thousand euros for barely four years of software support, it's such a disappointment.
That aside the camera is lackluster, it's auto whitebalance is horrific, turning the same snowy scene into a sunset or illuminated by fluorescent light depending on the phase of the moon and it's sampling questionable making images much more blurry in a surreal way. But the optical stabilisation is seriously impressive. Overall I preferred the pixel 4a's images though. A smaller phone and my zenfone's predecessor.
At least I get to just plug it into my stereo thanks to the 3.5mm jack though.
I don't know why it was reported so frequently as a compact phone, the ZenFones are much larger than the iPhone mini. It's the same size as a standard iPhone or Galaxy S series.
The Zenfone 10 is closer to an iPhone than an iPhone mini.
iPhone 16/Zenfone/13 Mini (in mm)
Height: 147.6/146.5/131.5 - the mini is 15mm shorter than the Zenfone which is only 1.1mm shorter than an iPhone.
Width: 71.6/68.1/64.2 - the mini is 3.9mm thinner than the Zenfone which is 3.5mm thinner than an iPhone
Depth: 7.8/9.4/7.7 - the Zenfone is significantly thicker than the iPhones.
Volume: 82.4/93.8/65.0 cubic cm - the Zenfone is physically larger than an iPhone 16 by a decent margin.
The Zenfone simply isn't close to an iPhone mini size. It's larger than an iPhone by volume and the depth does matter when holding it. If we're talking about front-edge to opposite front-edge, we're talking about 87.2mm for the iPhone vs 86.9mm for the Zenfone and 79.6 for the Mini. The Zenfone saves you 0.3mm in grip-distance over an iPhone, but a Mini saves you 7.6mm in grip-distance.
Heck, let's look at weight. A Zenfone is 172g, iPhone 170g, iPhone mini 141g. The Zenfone is the heaviest of the three.
One of the big limiting factors for Android phone manufacturers is the battery. iOS is a ton more efficient. The Zenfone is thicker to accommodate a 4300mAh battery compared to the iPhone 16's 3561mAh (21% larger battery). And the Zenfone's battery is kinda small by Android standards.
People often don't think about the challenges of making a small phone. The electronics don't shrink. If you need a certain square mm for those electronics, they take up a larger percentage of the interior on your mini. You don't need as large a battery because the screen it is powering is smaller, but not proportional to its size - you're still drawing the same power for all the electronics. So you have a smaller percentage of interior space for the battery and you need a larger battery relative to the interior space - or you need to sacrifice battery life as Apple did with the mini.
For example, the iPhone 13 mini is 84.4 sq cm and has a 2438mAh battery. The iPhone 13 is 104.9 sq cm with a 3240mAh battery. The iPhone 13 is 24% larger, but can accommodate a 33% larger battery - because the electronics take up basically the same space regardless of form factor.
So to make an Android mini, you'd be sacrificing a lot of battery life. The Zenfone is not a mini. Its grip-size is basically identical to an iPhone. In every way, it's much more an iPhone than a mini.
iPhone 6S: 138.3/67.1/7.1 = 65.9 cc the mini is just barely smaller.
iPhone 4S: 115.2/58.6/9.3 = 62.8 cc smaller than the mini.
Treo 650: 113/59/23 = 153 cc which is about the same volume as a Galaxy Z Fold 3... the displacement was so uncomfortable, people often used hip holsters for the former.
Nothing will make happier than ditching Apple and get a smaller Android phone. In fact the size of iPhone 5s was the only reason that had piqued my interest and I had migrated to the iPhones. Then I stayed for other (and important) reasons.
> Stock Android OS
Ah, no. I take that back. That is not going to be worth 700-800 just for the size! In fact take more and put it to a fight which tries to force Google to "decolonise" every aspect of this mobile OS and push for apps to go for alternative app stores.
But as long as Google has it claws and fingers and feet and palm and teeth (imagine every other organ) into my data (and also existence via sensors and what not) on an Android phone in every way possible (sometimes not even imaginable), such pervasive and entangled, that getting out of this Kafkaesque privacy nightmare means using a custom ROM that no OEM supports (or probably will every support) and half the app I use (including bank/payment/Govt apps) will stop functioning and it makes me feel like puking - even the thought of being tracked like that non-stop!
Until then sadly I will contribute to the trillions of Apple and participate in this cozy duopoly these companies have established and rather be in this Kafkaesque control and closed walled garden. It is sad.
So no, I am done with "Stock Android OS" trope at this point :(
The reality is - and it is a sad truth - such a phone in today's world can only exist as a vanity/niche product and hence even with high cost it will suffer from lack of support, abandoned update/upgrade promises, and a really really bad support experience unless it is released to "just few cities" (not even few countries) because this is going to attract such a small number of people!
"Stock Android" usually means "what runs on Pixels" in Android user circles, not actually AOSP. It's a comparison between Samsung/Huawei/Xiaomi/... and Google/OnePlus/Motorola/...
“Stock Android” means where Google does inside it what I have listed above in less savoury words. The ones you’ve listed are basically compromised devices in your pockets — so a notch higher or lower, depending upon how you look at all this :)
Of course, but that's why the bootloader is unlockable. A production device will ship with either a close-to-stock (== close-to-Pixel) ROM or a heavily customized one. If the ROM is closer to stock, it's easier to develop and maintain custom ROMs, so it makes sense to want that as opposed to the alternative.
That doesn’t really help. If you play around with it, the plat integrity test will not pass and there goes too many apps — so that nullifies even MicroG etc as well. I haven’t played around with microg’s #2611 (had seen it on github when it was getting implemented) but the point is — it will remain cat and mouse in this manner and that is a headache one doesn’t want to have on their primary device.
My only gripe with the Mudita Kompakt is that one of the reasons I need a smartphone is to run those little apps without which you cannot navigate the modern world - 2FA, corporate proprietary 2FA, parking, bank (my bank lets you deposit checks through the app, but not through the website, else I would only use the website). And a lot of those require the Play Integrity API at some level, unfortunately.
The idea that nobody wants a small phone seems odd to me when Asus Zen Fone 10 is extremely rare and the iPhone 13 mini only exists in retail as refurbs.
Just as an FYI to everyone who thinks such products are financially "infeasible" - look at companies like Unihertz (or heck, even Framework). Niche categories can and do attract a small but devoted following.
Btw:
1. Unihertz recently launched a BlackBerry esque phone (titan 2), if anyone reading this is interested. (Not sponsored by them)
2. There are many forums (and I think r/smallphones on reddit) where you can find much more discussion on such topics if you're interested.
Unihertz's phones are unfortunately simply technologically infeasible (to use). Their software is apparently write-once update-never, and any phone you buy of theirs will be riddled with permanent bugs.
If Unihertz kept their phones up to date for a few years after launch, rather than only for the few years prior to launch, they would be an incredibly strong competitor in this space but as they are they are next to useless.
Unihertz makes phones in a ton of interesting form factors. And then never support them with updates. The number of phones where my mouse has hovered over the "Add to Cart" button on their website before deciding updates are too important...
You'll probably have to compromise here a little too. Having "good" smartphone cameras is more about the software than the hardware (there's only so much you can do with small apertures and small sensors), and the flagships have huge R&D investments behind them.
I too want a small phone, and I'd be willing to settle for "passable" camera quality.
I switched from a Pixel 3a to an iPhone 16 and it really bothers me that it's way too huge for everyday usage. Maybe I have extremely short thumbs but here's the maximum reach I have on the screen when I hold my phone "normally" in my hand: https://i.postimg.cc/Cx97jxLZ/iphone16reach.png - I can't reach the upper part of the screen at all, without doing finger-gymnastics or using my other hand. I'd love to switch to a phone that is 50-60%% of the size of the iPhone 16 but there are essentially no (modern) options for this. It's really a bummer :(
It's clunky and stupid, but if you "swipe down" off the bottom of the screen, it will bring the top half down into the reachable area. That's the fix they chose, instead of making phones that fit in a human's hand.
I have both and they're surprisingly essentially the same size. Except the iPhone has less bezel and is thicker. I only have the iPhone for dev purposes and I actually prefer the Pixel 3a, but I'm afraid it might die soon...
Anyways, are you sure you're talking about the iPhone 16?
and they are Samsung Galaxy S's, a couple of Asus ZenFone's, and Google Pixel 5.
If you're willing to add another 5mm, there are also a couple of Sony Xperia's and Sharp Aquous, and Google Pixel 8. And if you want to cap the height at 145 mm - it's just Google Pixel 5.
We've seen this story play out before. Every phone manufacturer has had the bright idea of introducing a small flagship. They spend a ton of money developing and marketing it. Internet people get excited. And when launched - no one buys it. They learn their lesson and move on.
It does not surprise me that the things that "internet" people want are not generally popular. What I don't understand is why that means they can't make money selling them anyways. Companies used to make money when the entire cell phone market was _dramatically_ smaller than today. Sure, maybe only 5% of customers want that phone, but 5% of a huge market is still a lot of people! I just have trouble believing that there isn't room for serving that segment of the consumer base.
Yeah, that is surprising and frustrating to me as well. I don't mind being a smaller market. Hell, I don't mind paying more because of it. But companies these days are largely unwilling to have a steady, sustainable business in a smaller market. The insatiable desire to capture the biggest market at all times leaves society as a whole much worse off, because if your needs aren't the most common - you simply cannot find anyone who will do business with you.
Slight tangent, I thought nowadays everyone is (are?) internet people. Everyone's on their phone all the time. Even if it's tiktok or instagram, why aren't brands spending to reach this audience.
We are unfortunately a neglected part of the market.
I used to have a Pixel 5. As somebody who uses phones minimally (<10 min average screentime per day), but still wants utilities beyond a feature phone for special use cases (maps, translate, digital tickets, public transport, NFC payments), it was about as small as I needed it to be to tuck it away in my pocket for the whole day. It was also quite a nice form factor with a black stone-like back case, which didn't seem to scuff or attract fingerprints.
I had two of them. The first one lasted 2 years before the battery swelled up and I had to dispose of it. Google replaced it for free with another. Then eventually Google Pay stopped being supported on the second, since it was a few years beyond security updates.
After that I found no alternative within the Android ecosystem. I don't want to get into Apple products (despite minimal use, I did have the phone customised so that it was stripped bare in terms of apps and notifications, and had a launcher which I preferred over Google's native design), and every tech blog talking about small phones led back to Pixel 5, or one of the ones just after which was also out of sale and security coverage.
Even though they are sold at profit, I get the feeling phones are viewed by the industry as vehicles. Get one with a big screen into peoples hands, then keep riding on the payments for games, movies, TV and web browsing that follows that. As somebody who never used my phone for any of these things, I'm clearly not important to the market for the one-off payment of a new phone every 5/6 years.
Just a heads up, when I contacted Google Support about this, they insinuated that this is something slowly being rolled out across Pixel 5 devices, so while it may work now, it could stop at any moment.
The issue I received when tapping to pay was "Your phone doesn't meet software standards". It did mention it can be due to rooting (my phone wasn't rooted) or "uncertified software" (of which I didn't have any).
I'm sure you might already do so, but I'd advise not to rely on the phone to pay going forward. For me, I was caught off guard in a shop without any other payment method. There was no warning or notification about the change until I tapped to pay at the card terminal.
I tried a few more times afterwards with another payment method as backup, and it never worked again, even after rebooting, toggling NFC off and on. I never received an email, notification or warning in the app itself. It was quite disappointing as I reckon I could have run that phone for a few more years as a minimal phone.
Google did offer me about £100 off of a new Pixel. So if this happens to you and the lack of Google Pay is a dealbreaker, I'd give that a try.
Terrifying. I opened this thread to leave the same comment that Google pay is working for me on my pixel 5. I bought it second handed and replaced battery so I didn't spend too much money on it, but it would be a real shame when that rollout reaches me. Especially because I also quite enjoy the size and functionality. It's enough for everything I need to do on a phone..
In hindsight, I really miss using the Pixel 5 and semi-wish that I'd kept using it and just switched Google Pay/Wallet for card. The form factor and size was perfect.
I changed to a Pixel 9 because I had an opportunity around the same time to get it cheaper, and thought I may as well go to the latest model to keep security updates up to 2030. Even after a few months, I can't get used to the weight, size, the back case design (slippery glass and fingerprint magnet), and sticking out camera block. I still use the phone minimally, but now I carry around a brick everyday.
Yeah, I'll hold on to it until I lose the pay as well. I was looking at either pixel 8a or 9a for my next phone. Like you said with pixel 9, I assume it would be a big leap with both of these phones. But at least with 9a I won't have the camera bump problem so that's hopeful.
Market wants big phones. The solution... look to the east. Phone accessories to manage big phones. Many women with small hands using finger loops (that double as kickstands), wrist straps, full body lanyards.
Convincing main brands to dump 100s of millions to cater to small phone crowd should be proven DOA by now. The minimalist EDC crowd is niche aberration, most people throughout civilization EDC was more cumbersome. Most people are simply happy carrying more shit around. Look at Stanley cups.
TBH 99% of big phone yucky crowd problems would be solved by a lanyard, but that's too goofy in the west. IMO what we need is better pockets. Front of legs or side belly of shirt. Have a little place to attach a chain like pocket watches. Fix for big phones is not a smaller phone, but better accessory/wardrobe.
>Most people are simply happy carrying more shit around. Look at Stanley cups.
This is only true for the American lifestyle of home-car-office-car-home. If you need to walk for more than 30 seconds Stanley cups become extremely inconvenient.
I thought Stanley cups is a weird choice to make "more shit" sound wasteful or a bad thing. Typically I think the American lifestyle is people carrying fewer things usually. I walk or cycle most places but always take a backpack, but I've frequently seen American-centric communities dismiss this as weird (because the car becomes their backpack).
As plans develop during a day it's easy to end up being out of the house 12+ hours, so it's comfortable to have a refillable water bottle, warmer layers, sunglasses, hat, umbrella, any other comfort things etc.
You scroll in normal mode. One handed mode let's you reach top UI element with an extra gesture which is more or less all you need for if you want to operate a phone with thumb.
I disagree, it seems the Eastern phones are gigantic for some reason
And yes I do want smaller phones. Samsung S10e was the perfect size tbh.
But no it seems the option dwindle and now I can't find a phone smaller than my thumb. At least some phones have a "shrink screen" option, but that's not the same thing as a smaller phone tbh
Tiny market =/= no market, but not sustainable market. One hand mode + one hand type mode is not the same as small phone, but it makes one hand mode on big devices feasible. I'm personally waiting for eastern foldable phones to get hilariously gigantic so the front cover screen become useful "mini" phones.
Funnily enough, I don't consider the iPhone 12/13 mini miniature at all. Granted, my hands are quite small even for someone of my height (5'7"), but remember those times people made fun of the iPhone 5 and of how gigantic it felt compared to 4S? I don't think human hands have grown that much since then. And I still believe the 1st generation SE is the best smartphone Apple has ever released: a rectangular screen, no camera bumps, a fingerprint sensor (that is still faster than Face ID), a mini jack, light, affordable, etc.
Chinese manufactures has been using silicon carbon batteries with larger densities for long time, for example 6.3" vivo X200 FE has a 6500mAh battery which should solve small phone-smaller battery problem
That was the "peak smartphone" era for me; lots of companies making slightly different variations on Androids, at relatively low prices, but almost all of them with the same basic set of practical features which are nearly extinct today. Now it seems all we get are faster CPUs and RAM, more (non-removable) storage and battery capacity, no headphone jacks, a very limited choice of screen sizes, and far too many cameras along with the obligatory unremovable spyware and locked-down OS.
Silly question: how hard would it be to find some manufacturer in China, that could manufacture several hundreds or thousands of low-mid range devices, of iPhone SE size or similar? Would be great to have ability to run PostmarketOS.
Switched from my iPhone 13 mini to a Qin F21 Pro.
I will buy phones like this as long as I can ! It was a pain to setup but it works well for what I want (having a smartphone in Canada)
I have on my desk, the Galaxy S8, iPhone SE (First generation), the iPhone 13 Mini, the iPhone 14 Pro and the Galaxy S22. I intentionally now choose and look for phones that are the smallest possible now (S25, iPhone 15pro or 16pro) etc
My favorite to take with me is the 13 Mini. Would love an iPhone 18 mini.
Wow, that exploded over night :D
It's nice to see, I am not alone.
With Android working on including a "desktop mode" where you can add a screen and HID devices, I sure hope that the phone screens will get smaller again.
Unfortunately this still hasn't happened yet. There are almost no good options for reasonable size Androids anymore. Zenfone 10 is pretty good, especially with the headphone jack, but it's already out of print and will be obsolete before long. And smaller would be nicer.
People recommending Zenfone just proves that marketing works on a lot of people. It's literally only a few mm smaller than a standard flagship samsung and yet the small phone crowd recommends it as if it's tiny
I had filled out the form for this. Wish Eric stuck to this instead of the Pebble revival: it'd have a bigger market.
I don't understand how the market isn't considered big enough for any phone OEM: how can it be smaller than that of foldables? Or even if it is, isn't it still big enough, and shouldn't there generally be more sizes and form factors of phones?
It's as tho the car industry decided to only make 184" long SUVs (6.2-6.7" phones) and 200" long 3-row SUVs (foldables)... no other SUVs, no sedans/hatchbacks, no sports cars (much smaller and much lower volume). And different cars are actually hard to engineer and mass-manufacture the chassis and bodies for... in contrast a phone's HW is inherently more modular and mostly just the screen and battery need to be changed for each size.
I recently got a Samsung S25 and it's the best phone I've ever had. I went for the base model and the size is just perfect. It's a small enough phone that I barely feel I carry around all day. It's light and slim and has premium tier hardware so I don't miss out. Never paid more than £300 for a phone before, but I am more than happy with this one.
It was quite strange to read this title this morning as my 15 year old daughter just received her iPhone 13 mini yesterday from Swappie. She too was complaining that the android phones are too big for her little hands.
I tried all my reasoning skills to persuade her to stick with android, but ultimately she nagged me into getting a second hand one that is still way too expensive in my opinion.
Well it looks like she is right and this is popular opinion. Perhaps small Android phones not selling well is a marketing problem. I've never seen one advertised with size being a selling point.
Thing about iphones is yea, they’re expensive, but if well-cared for can last you longer. I’m on a 6-year upgrade cycle and could stretch that more if I wanted to. Will go from my 12 pro to the 18 or 19 pro.
I signed up for this perhaps two years ago. I don't remember the update banner being present at the top which says it's officially moving forward. I didn't find anything more on that, what's the actual status now?
I also wanted one, then Samsung released the foldable phones. The Z Flip was exactly what I wanted. Now that the Fold is so thin, I want it as a small iPad. I feel that Samsung has solved the small Android phone problem in a different way with foldables
I've wanted a small android phone for a while now too, but partly because I just don't care much for smartphones and want a small and cheap option. Ideally it'd be a pixel so that it should support GrapheneOS.
The foldables are such an interesting concept. I actually had a Surface Duo for a while (though a different style of foldable) and really liked it, but I only had one after they were a year old and I could try it out with a used phone for ~$200.
I guess people want different things out of small phones. I had a Z flip 3 for a few years because I thought the small pocket size would be nice, but it still doesn't solve the main issue that I can't reach the whole screen with my thumb. (and besides that I have a million other complaints about it, never going to buy a foldable again)
We see those posts regularly about people wanting a flagship small phone, but I see two options:
- either the market is dysfunctional, and the niche of people wanting those devices does not meet the smartphone offer.
- or the market is even smaller than what they think, making it unsustainable.
Both can be solved with time and patience (waiting for this to happen as conditions change) — or by voting with your wallet and making this requirement have priority over others (security, updates, quality, performance, compatibility, etc.).
> "But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts."
The slab form factor is excellent industry design; modern efforts to integrate a hardware-keyboard, i. e. in a non-detachable way, are quite frankly daft. It buys the worst of both worlds: added complexity and error-proneness, more (dead) weight, awkward handling, harder maintainability/repairability, etc.
The form factor that was represented by Psion-machines such as the 3- or 5-series was great at the time, but is now obsolete, as evidenced by Planet Computers' recreations. Integrated sliders (e. g. F(x)tec) are only marginally better.
Technically, the solution of course is very elegant and simple:
1. Slab-form factor UMPC/smartphone
2. Corresponding detachable (as "attachable folder"), roughly Psion 5-sized keyboard a similar
3. Small "click-in" keyboard dock à la Pinephone keyboard or a
4. Detachable slider
But that is indeed just one variable in the whole equation; there's a whole set of features I consider essential for a smartphone- or UMPC-like device that one doesn't find anymore.
"My goal here is to rally other fans of small phones together and put pressure on Google/Samsung/anyone to consider making a small phone." 41k people is impressive, but that doesn't move the needle for any of these companies by a long long shot
I had a Samsung A3 (2016) which was almost the exact form factor of the iPhone Mini.
I loved it for being so small and light. The last few years it became too slow for regular use (and many apps refused to install) so I put it in airplane mode and used it as an mp3 player.
I'd still be using it today, but I lost it! I was very sad.
I also loved the LG K8 (2017), wonderful device. That one was a touch bigger, but had a really nice curved screen.
I used an iPhone SE (2016) until last year actually, which was even smaller.
It worked fine, until software updates made it useless. That's a recurring theme with my phones!
> I used an iPhone SE (2016) until last year actually, which was even smaller. It worked fine, until software updates made it useless. That's a recurring theme with my phones!
Very similar story with me. The iPhone SE 1st gen was peak iPhone. Small, had a headphone jack (and could charge while using headphones), nice display, decent battery life. I absolutely loved that phone. I miss having it every day (when I have to use two hands to use this clunker of a phone I have now, when I sit down and feel this gigantic phone in my pocket, etc).
I used my iPhone 4 until the cellular radio wasn't supported anymore. Then I moved into an iPhone SE 1st gen. When the battery bulged I killed it trying to replace the battery (I am not suited to small electronics repair). I gave up, at that point, and moved to a janky Android phone because I couldn't get any phone I wanted from Apple (small and with a headphone jack).
I wish I could have enthusiasm for phones again. Everything isn't what I want.
I certainly won't make the mistake of making a phone integral to my personal workflows and habits again. I certainly won't come to rely on any native apps anymore, either.
I recognize I'm a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the market. Very few people regard their technology like I do. I feel like the computers (and, at one time, the phones) I use are extensions of myself. I think it's a little like how a musician might regard a beloved instrument, or a craftsman might regard a well-used tool. Very few people get bent out of shape about subtle changes in UI, appearance, latency, or functionality the way I do.
I'm still on my first gen iPhone SE. Thankfully the apps I use are mostly compatible, and I just use web versions for everything else. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times each.
Samsung's S-series (without plus or ultra or edge or whatever) is basically this. Not quite as small as an iPhone mini, but just about small enough to be ok for me. Shouldn't be any bigger though (especially not wider!). For me the width is the big issue with big phones. It just feels uncomfortable in the hand then.
I literally have dwarf hands, after experimenting with various form factors I've settled on using iPhone SE (4.7") as the main phone and a android (6.7") running FOSS stack as the secondary phone.
I get the "just works" with decent privacy aspect of the smaller iPhone, health benefits from Apple Watch and for anything requiring longer screen time, termux, shelter cloned apps etc. I use the bigger android (Infact I'm typing this on the excellent HN client Hacki from android).
Earlier I used to use Apple Watch with android using a tool I built[1] which now serves notifications from android to my iPhone.
I'm glad Eric is going ahead with the small phone.
Forget Apple sizes, I want a 3-4 inch sqaure (4:3) phone. Preferrably with a keyboard that folds or slides out. Something I can use with one hand or two and not have to switch to two hands to tap an upper corner.
Imo the real problem here is being able to use a phone with one hand, UI standardization led both android and iphone unusable with one hand, so I'd argue we actually stopped research mobile touch interfaces. A smaller phone would still need you to stretch the thumb to the other side of the screen
I'm still using a 2013 LG G2 (SD800) and can't find a single device that I can switch to. The compact size is just perfect. iPhone 5/s/e was also pretty good but apple killed them with updates :/
Dream phone: Underclocked Samsung25 internals, iPhone SE design/dimensions, at least 90hz OLED panel, 1 back decent camera, 1 front too. 3A battery. Preferably an extenal SD card slot.
By the way, Apple is horribly behind in this area. It is time for them to realize that not everybody wants the same form factor. And people are getting bored by Apple's run-of-the-mill designs.
I'm a convert on this topic. I went from wanting a small phone to being unable to wait to ditch mine.
Like the OP, I switched from Android (Pixel 3a) to an iPhone SE 3 specifically for the smaller form factor. After using it for over a year, I've found the trade-offs in battery life and camera quality are too significant for my daily use.
These limitations aren't an issue when I'm at home or my desk with easy access to a charger. However, they become acute the moment I'm out for the day. For example, using GPS for navigation or connecting Bluetooth accessories becomes a liability. I can't rely on the phone to last. Also, photos are noticeably more pixelated, and the quality drop-off is clear compared to larger, contemporary phones.
This thread is evidence that the niche for small phones exists. But it's for people willing to accept these compromises by carrying a dedicated camera, a power bank, and using wired peripherals. For me and as the market suggests for most consumers, small phones just doesn't work out as reliable all-in-one devices. I'll probably wait till early next year to pick up one of the new iPhones after they iron out the initial kinks.
> carrying a dedicated camera, a power bank, and using wired peripherals
I'm a small-phone person, and I don't think these _should_ be necessary. I'm fine with wired peripherals (and prefer them), but in 2025, with efficient chips, I don't see why we can't power a device much longer than 24 hours. What if it had decade-old hardware, and -- this is the bit I think is the problem -- the operating system and apps were efficient?
Same with a camera. It seems more about thickness than width; I don't believe it should be impossible to put a large-phone-format camera in a smaller phone. It may take battery space, but see above, we should be ok there these days.
"the trade-offs in battery life and camera quality are too significant" - a small but thicker phone would have no trouble with battery life and could for sure have the same good cameras as larger phones – and could possibly even ditch the camera bump if it just made the entire phone as thick as the camera bump to fit a larger battery.
(After all, easiest way to increase battery size is to increase the smallest dimension. Add 1mm to a 4-4.5mm thick battery and you'll increase the battery size by 22-25%. Make the iPhone 13 Mini as thick as its camera bump and you would probably add ≈2.4mm, which would make the battery 60% larger)
If one were to make a iPhone 17 Pro Mini as thick as the iPhone 4 then it would:
- Likely still weigh less than a Pro Max
- Have a battery with a capacity larger than the Pro Max
- Have the pro cameras stick out about as much as they did on the iPhone 6
And it would feel as robust and solid as an iPhone 4 – my favorite iPhone so far
The iPhone SE 3 might have a poor camera, but the one on the iPhone mini 13 is excellent!
My conclusion is the same as the author’s: it’s a matter of you get what you pay for. The demand here is for a small premium phone. This would come with a good set of cameras.
Since Pixel 3a and iPhone SE 3, the battery technology has improved and especially the charging times have gone down dramatically so the battery life experience you had then would not occur today with the same form factor.
I want a reliable e-ink phone. Minimal phone is good but flaky to the point that it is annoying.
Odd UX that can't be configured (and no idea why). For example, if you touch the power button, it'll unlock and wake up the phone. There's no way to turn that off and require a click. Other android phones can but not minimal. like what the hell was going through their decision making process?
Most things which require a phone number block any kind of virtual number service since the only reason they are asking for a phone number is anti spam and KYC.
I tried to make the softphone approach work but I was unreachable far too often when Android decided to kill whichever softphone app I tried.
And if it did keep running, I'm pretty sure it consumed decently more energy than a dedicated telephony module. And yeah as mentioned, even with a "real" local phone number ported to voipms, I wasn't able to get sms codes from some services.
I was using Xperia XZ1 compact (4.6") and then moved to Vivo X70 pro+ (6.9") and it's so much easier for the eyes and typing. Yes, it's not the most convenient thing to carry around but I'd rather have less eye strain and typos.
Also I think China makes 3-4" android phones but they're mostly a joke spec wise
I'm very happy with my Unihertz Jelly Max aside from the camera being not great. I think it's the smallest it can reasonably be (62.7mm wide) while still having its touchscreen keyboard be usable and because it's fairly thick it actually feels good to hold in my hands and I don't need to stick one of those silly pop sockets on the back.
My iPhone 12 Mini's camera just broke (the zoom is failing..) I have been poking around for any solution that is around the same size. The best answer is generally never-heard-of companies that pop new phone models out and no certainty as to how long they'll last or be supported. That's on top of having to switch platforms (again).
I'm resigned to getting a new iPhone in Sept - reluctantly.
I have an xperia compact phone I bought for $50 in Japan. It's a bit slow, but I don't do much on it other than jot down notes, maps, photos (the lens is a bit broken so it creates a cool lens flare effect), and messaging. Fits nicely in my pocket and hand. A giant phone just seems so silly to me.
It is simply more difficult to cram the specs into a smaller form factor and they sell for less. A loose-loose situation. The same is happening in the tv market. 32” is disappearing because it’s more expensive to build smaller 4k displays.
I remember when people complained that the iphone 6 was ridiculously big ... I'll keep my 12mini until it dies. Then I might buy another 12mini on ebay. I don't edit videos on my phone That's what desktops are for.
I considered the SE2 but went with the regular iphone after seeing the battery life was much worse on the SE2. Think that's probably what killed the iPhone mini too.
i get it. i want one of those. the problem is that most cellphones are not actual cellphones, they are entertainment machines. they are a pocket tv / social media feed place. most usage for my normal friends is for that.
I love mini phones too but how naive do you have to be to trust a random page over an actual phone manufacturer? I can get a new pixel at 500$, install GrapheneOS on it, and call it secure enough. I wish google would make mini-pixel versions, same as apple does with SE
I want an Android phone that doesn't break. My iPhone is a beast, but I hate using it, I'm too used to the Android interface (especially the keyboard, I can't believe how bad the keyboard is on iOS). But every Android phone I've ever had gets dinged up very easily and eventually falls apart.
I bought an iPhone 15 and a Pixel 7 at the same time when I started a new job 2 years ago. I keep my work stuff on the iPhone. For the first year, I kept them in the same pocket and had them both everywhere with me. The Pixel within a few weeks was starting to look beat up. The iPhone still looks practically brand new.
Just last night, I got home, pulled my Pixel out of my pocket, and found a crack near the corner of the screen. Now the screen is glitching out on the bottom 15% of the screen. I didn't drop it, I didn't bump into anything. Regular pocket pressure while sitting in my car must have bent it and it buckled.
My wife has had similar experiences with Samsung phones.
If it weren't for the lack of good browsers on iOS, I'd put up with the shitty keyboard.
I wish there was a phone, preferably with buttons (bb q10 like), that can run WhatsApp, banking app and Apple Pay (or whatever android version is). Also it should be running these stupid government apps. And music please... preferably with 3.5mm jack so I can connect my nice headphones.
This phone can have mediocre camera.
I have it since more than a year. I had the first one two weeks because I lost it as it fall through a hole in my pocket. So fix your pockets and buy this phone. I'm really happy with it :)
And didn't found bugs since I have it.
Mobiles are made by Asian companies to Asian tastes. They like big screens so that's what we get. The two exceptions are apple iPhones and Google pixel. The two American companies making phones for American tastes. Shame as the old 4.5" mobiles had such large bezels they could have accommodated 6" modern screens...
With a battery that can be swapped rapidly without tools. Bonus points for pogo pins like a Samsung XCover phone.
Smaller size means smaller battery, but that's mitigated by the above. I want utilitarian. I don't want a phablet. I want practical and unobtrusive. The smartwatch was meant to replace the phone, but doesn't hit the right notes for me.
In past lives, I've clung to 3.5mm jacks and battery swaps (although I consider myself much reformed, yes I maybe would buy an updated LG v20 if one were released: that was an amazingly built metal slate of a phone with both. Just hot and slow, on that Snapdragon 820).
Today, bluetooth works quite well for me (I love not having cables... but it sucks that performance with a microphone is trashfire). 3.5mm adapters are cheap and easy when needed (rarely. I also have a $10 bluetooth->3.5mm in my travel kit that does get used once a year!). And with usb-c providing fast charging, I rarely feel like I'd benefit from battery swaps. I can give myself 50%+ in 30 minutes, with a portable battery that will power not just my phone, but any other device I run into. With Qi 2.2 releasing with 25W wireless charging, and magnetic coupling being standard now, you don't even need wires anymore. Carrying a bespoke phone-only battery seems like a massive downgrade today. (It also felt like a massive fire hazard!) Time to update your expectations!
Worth mentioning that battery swaps make water-resistance much much trickier to pull off. There' a real cost to battery-swappability.
I do wish we saw something like Ara, some phone modularity & extensibility. Fairphone has some modular parts, but it doesn't feel like an open ecosystem, and the parts dont seem super designed for expansion but more just replacement. I guess maybe Framework is doing the best work, albeit in a bigger form factor space, with their Expansion Cards, which are basically just a card form factor USB-C. Licensed CC-BY-4. https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards
I've come around on swapping batteries, and have decided that external battery packs are the way to go. Works on more devices, and you're not buying batteries that work on exactly one device.
Still want my phone battery to be replaceable, but I'm pretty fine with not being able to do it myself.
My first Android phone was an HTC Desire S. It had a rather sturdy metal case with some plastic inserts for the antennas. The bottom insert slid off to reveal the battery and SIM and SD slots. The only downside is that because of this construction it has the USB port on the side. I used it way beyond official support by installing custom ROMs, but eventually apps got so bloated it couldn't run them without frustrating me.
So, uh, can I please have that but with a more modern SoC and a non-potato camera?
I'm definitely open to the idea of foldables or even flip phones (perhaps even enthused!). I'm gutted that the Japanese "Galapagos syndrome" keitei are becoming extinct with fewer and fewer releases each year. The ones that are newly available tend to run Android 10 (yikes). The keitei were always very tasteful, ergonomic, and sensible. Sure, not always flashy in specs, but they didn't need to be when they prioritized the form above everything. Would love for the rest of the world to pick up this dropped ball and run with it.
I've also been interested in this but a little at sea when it comes to navigating the alternate dimension of Japanese flip phones. Do you have any recommendations when it comes to identifying the last best example of the Japanese flip phone?
All this is available on China market. Go buy there. Everyone always makes this post when they can just buy Chinese phone. Go get a Soyes or something.
I busted out my old 4S, and the fit//finish,, materials, and just how nice it is to hold in your hand and operate are still really nice. Would love to fill it with modern guts.
There is Unihertz, but their 5G model is crap. They also don't update their OS.
I believe the big manufacturers don't want to make a small phone (as other users have indicated) because of the big screen's addictiveness. Also, they can't fit a large battery in them so battery life would be a few hours with 1000mp 16k cameras.
I'd rather carry a 1" thick, 4" tall phone than a 0.3" thick 8" tall phone. No pants pockets look normal anymore, and it is even more awkward to walk with tight pants.
Got two weeks ago a update for my jelly star. Don't know what they changed, whas not many, maybe some bugfixes. But I would be really angry when they just change the android version and the way I have to use the phone just with a over the air update that is installed without warning with one button press.
Android 16 is out, and Jelly Star is still Android 13. Unihertz doesn't even have that many phones to worry about updates. I don't understand why they aren't updating it to the latest. Look at the iPhone 11. Got iOS 18 after 6 years.
You can believe whatever you want, but it doesn’t make it true. We know exactly why they make larger devices and it’s not a secret, it’s what consumers by and large want. It’s not a conspiracy.
Every time a vendor falls for the “we want small phones” thing, they sell poorly thus proving the point again and again that it’s a minority at best that are interested.
Theory: I prefer the iPhone mini because my hands are bigger. I think some people with smaller hands care less because they aren’t losing as much control as I am when the phone is bigger, not as much of a ratio difference.
iPhone 12 mini lover and user checking in here. The haters will berate us for our choice stating that "no one wants a small phone", but that's a lie. Normal sized phones were never going to be instant day-one hits. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to launch them during Covid, offer them 2 years, and say no one wants them.
Give them a permanent place in the lineup, treating phones like every other very personal device meant for humans. Small, medium, and large.
If you do that, and give people time to see exactly why 5.42 screens are superior to 6.1"+ sizes, then I think the numbers will start to change from what we saw with the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini, which were both launched when people were less on the go than in 100 years.
This is equivalent to something I called the "QWERTY paradox" more than a decade ago:
Back when the Smartphone market exploded, people disliked typing on a touchscreen and repeatedly stated that they want a device with a physical keyboard.
There was plenty of evidence, surveys, market studies, trend predictions, devices for these "Messaging-centric" use-cases were always part of this market-demand roster.
But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.
Every major vendor went through this cycle of learning that lesson, usually with an iteration like "it needs to be a premium high-spec device" --> (didn't sell) --> "ah, it should be mass-market" --> (also didn't sell).
You can find this journey for every vendor. Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, Sony.
The same lessons were already learnt for small-screen devices: There was a "Mini" series of Samsung Galaxy, LG G-series, HTC One, Sony Xperia. It didn't sell, the numbers showed that it didn't attract additional customers, at best it only fragmented the existing customer-base.
Source: I work in that industry for a long time now
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