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People don’t buy them for the price they’ll buy bigger phones. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
They have to make the phone cost $300 less to sell in meaningful numbers. Why do that when they could just not make them at all and sell fewer models at higher prices?
exactly, profit margin. people aren’t upgrading every year like they used to, so they have to make up (some of) that lost profit by increasing prices.
Yes, $300 was for the current flagship back then.
They suck and also the higher capacity batteries take up too much space now.
Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can’t go back because they don’t sell any small phones.
I’ve been maining a Unihertz Jelly Star, I quite like it.
I want one. Can you put a custom ROM on them?
per @[email protected] in another comment here:
The old jelly pro had a decent modding community, and I definitely was able to unlock the bootloader and root it, though not sure about degoogling.
Yeah, I can’t ever find modders using the new one and I’m not willing to get an old used one.
I am using Unihertz Jelly Star for more than a year now with custom LineageOS ROM. Works well with it. I used this guide to flash it: https://www.reddit.com/r/unihertz/comments/16sviga/unihertz_jelly_star_running_great_with_lineageos/?rdt=36027
Nice. Actually logged in to save that post. Thanks
NICE
I’m clinging to my SE. It’s the last small phone made by anyone other than Chinese no-names. I will be sad when it’s no longer viable as an option.
There was the iPhone 13 Mini. It’s adorably small. But it didn’t sell well so they stopped making the Mini line.
I’ve got a 12 mini and bought it just because it was small. Had nothing else from the apple ecosystem (altho I did buy airpods with the phone cause it had no 3.5mm jack), and still bought it just because it was small. People like to point out and laugh at how tiny the phone is, but I don’t care cause at least I don’t have to carry around half a tablet everyday. Sad to hear they discontinued the mini line, even tho I wasn’t planning on buying apple again.
I’ll use my 13 mini until I literally can’t anymore. Sadly it seems like maybe Apple will release a clamshell to get back to the pocketable size but never a mini phone again. Wish the 16e used a mini chasis
my Chinese tiny phone has a name, it’s the Unihertz Jelly Star. they even have a subreddit, not sure what makes you think it’s a “no name” they make a lot of phones for niches in today’s world including one with a physical qwerty keyboard.
now the fact that they’re the only company filling those niches sucks, but it’s better than nobody doing it.
Well, how’s it supported? This is usually what kills these phones. Even brand like Xiaomi dump their non-flagship model really soon. I have one, bought as a new model, was officially supported for like a year. Great.
I’m not really sure. what happened when it was no longer officially supported?
It just stopped receiving updates, even security ones.
But can it run a degoogled Android rom well?
not sure. stacking niches means there’s a good chance the answer is no though.
if it’s just a matter of specs it should be up to it, the hardware is pretty beefy for a phone, but I figure there’s more to it than that.
personally I don’t have the spoons to pour in the effort required to degoogle. the fact that the algs and few ads I see are completely irrelevant to me suggest that I have thoroughly confused them by how non-standard my internet usage is. I’m not overly concerned about the data they do get or what they do with it.
there are enough Man-Made Horrors Beyond My Comprehension™️ keeping me up at night but you do you
The old jelly pro had a decent modding community, and I definitely was able to unlock the bootloader and root it, though not sure about degoogling.
Seems to not be supported by Lineage… I wonder if a more privacy-preserving OS can be installed at all? I don’t trust stock ones.
Edit: another comment here links to a Reddit post about installing a modified Lineage there - haven’t checked it yet, but seems like it IS possible!
Still using mine too and it’s awesome, all my coworkers also notice and compliment it. I do think there is a market for small phones
They do, but service providers don’t like selling them. There isn’t as much of a return on smaller/ dumb/ cheap phones. I used to work at spectrum, and we’d speak of the cheap phones in hushed tones like they were the boogeyman. It felt horrible because I was using my cheap android while selling people iPhone 15s.
So once again instead of providing choice the market is simply phasing out things with smaller profit margins as if they planned it together in some kind of cartel.
Demand also isn’t there. The iPhone SE sold ok, but the other thing to keep in mind was that it was the cheap iPhone too so it’s supposed to sell.
If it was outselling the main model every year then they’d keep making them small. But they didn’t so they got dropped.
If it was outselling the main model every year then they’d keep making them small.
Why would they do that if they make more money on the main model? It’s not like you have a choice in iOS manufacturers.
Not really, even the cheap phones have large screens now. There’s no correlation anymore between price and screen size, the cheap phones just have lower quality panels.
I picked the Pixel 8 because:
- it runs GrapheneOS
- It was a little smaller than the Pixel 8 Pro
If there was a smaller version available, I would’ve gotten that instead.
I can’t trust anything made by google. It’s a company that literally makes its money capturing everything everyone does on the internet…and yet the phone they make is the ONLY phone immune to having everything captured…
Sorry. Not buying it. There will be a chip in there phoning home we’ll find out about in a decade.
I doubt that, but I respect the skepticism. I happen to trust the GrapheneOS devs to reveal if that was the case.
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Is there an 8a? Those are usually the smallest model
There is. The screen is smaller, but the actual phone is bigger 🤦♂️
Wow, dumb. The last a I had was the 4a, which was notably smaller.
I’ve been using the “A” branch of the Pixel line for years now.
But I use CalyxOS so I guess you and I have to be enemies now. My name is Inigo Montoya, you use a different OS, prepare to die.
Ah man… I just installed graphene to try it … (turns around and runs)
.
Seriously though, would be nice if they could get along and share code and efforts, I’d love to try a graphene-hardened OS with sandboxed microg (instead of gsf) and datura firewall :) Maybe even have the option to have microg in one profile and google play in another. One can dream
Graphene and Calyx are two different paths to two different destinations. Graphene is for security, Calyx is for privacy.
Yep, that’s what I gather as well. I just wish we didn’t have to choose, and could get both
I picked the Pixel A because:
- It runs GrapheneOS
- It’s slightly smaller and slightly cheaper than the normal version
- The back is plastic and not glass
Glad I can use it and type on it one-handed, can’t imagine using a bigger phone.
I almost did, but I found the 8 used for a good price and the size difference was minimal.
The only A series Pixel phone smaller than the Pixel 8 was the Pixel 4a.
Pixel 8, even now that 9 is out, is still around $400 compared to 7’s already huge $300.
That point absolutely still stands.
It’s just strange that since the 4a, the 2 smallest phones Google released were both not in the a series.
If the pixel series had a damn SD card slot it would be the perfect phone for me.
I just want to sync all of my music and local backups to an SD card via syncthing dammit. I don’t want to have to pay 200€ for them adding a 5€ chip
I picked the Sony Xperia 1v because:
- 71mm width (similar to pixel 8)
- Flagship specs (*for 2023 - Snapdragon 8 gen2 / 12gb)
- not Google Samsung or Apple
- little to no bloatware
- Decent cameras
- SD card expandable
- Headphone jack 3.5mm (though I haven’t used it yet)
- No glass back (and solid build quality allround)
- LineageOS support (for when vendor support runs out)
- I got a good refurb deal in 2024
I was considering a Zenphone 10 or Xperia 5 v - mainly for size and brand reasons as above - when i found this for £650
I picked the 5ii for similar reasons at the time.
The problem is it only gets 2 years of support, so I haven’t gotten an update in years. Sony is living in 2010.
The fingerprint reader slowly stopped working 6 months ago via a prolific software bug that is all over forums for xperias that will never be fixed.
The battery (even ONLY charging it to 80% using battery care) is horrific after a few years, mediocre when I got it and the standby time is shit. It loses 1.5-2% battery per hour not being used at all now. I get maybe 4h SOT browsing (much less with video).
The default camera app is crap and not even worth using…
I want to try lineageOS when I get the time to see if it fixes the battery and fingerprint reader, but here in Belgium we really need access to our bank apps because almost everything is done through there.
Edit: also the xperia 1v has a glass back… https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_1_v-12263.php
I had a 5 II too, used lineageOS for years, worked great. Doesn’t totally solve the battery or fingerprint reader. My screen got the dreaded green lightsaber too. Nail in the coffin was Australia turning off 3G so it can’t make calls anymore. (Wasn’t officially sold here so they didn’t bother loading it with VoLTE profiles)
I upgraded to a Sony Xperia XZ2 compact last year. It has a 5" screen and decent capabilities, the only down side is it doesn’t support 5G. For a phone that’s over 5 years old, it’s probably the most recent usable phone available which actually fits in my pocket.
Seriously, don’t show me a damn tablet computer and try to sell it to me as a mobile phone. If you can’t make a compact phone then you’re not really advancing the technology, are you?
If I can’t use it one-handed (using ALL physical buttons and ALL parts of the screen), then it’s not a phone.
Seriously, this is how we used to define the difference between phones and tables - one-hand or two-hand use.
Right? I mean I’m still lamenting the loss of slider keyboards, typing on a screen is so damn unreliable that I was forced to turn on the auto-correction, which itself is highly unreliable and constantly changing real words while failing to fix the words where I hit a number instead of a letter (the word “9f” gets typed a LOT!). I use my phone for phone calls and sending texts, with a secondary usage as a GPS in my truck. If it can’t perform one of three basic tasks then what good is it?
I don’t want a small phone or a slide out keyboards.
I want :
Replaceable battery.
Non glass back.
3.5 jack.Galaxy Xcover series.
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The xcovers backs usually stay on when you drop them and the back only really holds the battery in. The internals are protected by another layer of plastic.
As you say the specs do suck though.
3.5 jack.
They exist, but it’ll constrain your phone choices a lot.
I’d just get a USB-C-to-1/8"-TRS adapter. If you want to charge while playing, you can get one with passthrough.
Without passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-Female-Samsung-Devices/dp/B08Z3B5QL3
or with passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/ZOOAUX-Headphone-Charging-Earphones-Compatible/dp/B094Z6149B
Can probably just leave the thing plugged into your headphones.
Yeah I get they exist, but I will lose that in a day
Just leave it plugged into the headphones, don’t even take it off. I mean, I have 1/4 inch audio hardware, and I’ve got 1/8 inch headphones that have a 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch adaptor that just lives on the end.
I totally understand people who want to use wired, TRS headphones. They’re inexpensive, widespread, aren’t going to become e-waste when their battery dies, aren’t going to become obsolete when radio protocols move on, are lightweight, don’t suffer from radio interference etc. I have a bunch of TRS headphones and like them. Only downside is that they need some power source if you want to do ANC, but it’s not like one has to have ANC.
But…I think that a lot of people are treating it as a “we live in a Bluetooth world or a wired headphones world, and which we do depends on whether there’s a TRS jack on the phone itself”.
I’d also add that if you have a USB-to-TRS device acting as your DAC, you can swap in others, aren’t stuck with the on-phone DAC. I had a phone that had an extremely obnoxious tendency to, when charging in the car, play noise back through the headphones jack (and thus to my car’s aux jack and through the speakers). Was fine on Bluetooth. Problem was that the manufacturer had failed to stick the proper filtering circuitry in the power supply for the DAC and was spewing noise from USB power into the audio output, probably because you couldn’t see a problem when the phone was running on battery and filtering circuitry for the DAC uses up space in the cramped confines of the phone. (In practice, USB power can be amazingly dirty – I was astonished watching some people with oscilloscopes look at the power lines on USB.) Anyway, the noise was appalling. If you use the built-in DAC, you can’t really change the thing out. With an external DAC, you can stick a reasonable one in.
I don’t know how the ones I linked to above perform. But I’m confident that if they are a problem, there are other DACs out there. Whereas with a built-in jack, you get the DAC that the phone manufacturer provides, and clearly some are willing to ship their phones with an inadequate DAC.
I’d kind of like to see someone set up a rig with intentionally-dirty USB power and a bunch of USB audio interfaces and USB-powered devices with an audio output and then see how much noise leaks through into the DAC’s output.
EDIT: I also had a (purely analog) audio mixer at one point that used USB power and also leaked audible – not as bad as my phone in the car – noise from the USB power source into the audio. Solved that by moving it from my computer’s USB output to a dedicated USB charger. I’m sure that there’s still leakage and if I were doing pro audio work with that hardware, I’d still be looking at it, but at least it isn’t easily-perceptible to me any more.
I also had an inexpensive USB audio interface that leaked a little audible noise into its output, one of these:
It wasn’t terrible — I used the thing for years — and on that, moving the USB cable around would adjust how much audible noise was making it out the DAC’s output, so it was definitely unfiltered noise coming in from USB power.
I think that it might be underappreciated how bad the DAC situation in home electronics is. I haven’t seen people trying to measure and quantify it. I have seen lots of people going to great lengths to measure frequency response on headphones, whether or not a digital data cable has (probably completely unnecessary) shielding, and worry about the encoding of their music and sometimes even its encoding for wireless transmission to headphones over Bluetooth. But “how much junk from the power source is leaking into the DAC’s output” seems to be a curiously un-measured area.
IDK, i have Big hands, so using those was a pain for me lmao.
Because most people don’t buy them?
It’s like asking “Man, why don’t they make slider phones anymore?” (and I loved my slider phone).
As a lover of small phones, unfortunately that’s the truth. Apple tried a couple years ago with their iPhone mini and sold very few. Still, there should be enough of us that maybe some smaller phone manufacturers could fill this niche.
And maybr make it fully unlocked and repairable, replaceable battery, etc. while they’re at it.
Did I overlook the sales numbers? Do they exist?
You’re right, I thought I remembered that article giving actual figures but instead it just handwavily says they didn’t sell many.
So, here is one that actually quotes a number, 3% of the whole iPhone lineup: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopular-march-quarter/
And another: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/iphone-13-mini-makes-up-a-tiny-percentage-of-apple-sales
And another, this one says 5% for some reason: https://www.notebookcheck.net/iPhone-13-Mini-sales-continue-to-disappoint-as-rumors-claim-the-iPhone-14-Mini-may-be-axed.593194.0.html
Either way 3% - 5% is a small number for Apple (or Samsung, or…) which might not justify making a small phone, but in absolute numbers, thats actually a lot of people! A smaller manufacturer should definitely be able to profitably fill this niche…
Why does it need to the most people buying them. Why can’t it be a minority?
Because cell phones are a business. If not enough people buy a format, it dies out.
See: Rotary phones.
That’s right. The market has spoken, and unfortunately it has said it doesn’t want small phones. Personally, I still do though.
you could get a Unihertz Jelly Star like me
I don’t think it’s the consumer market. It’s more expensive to manufacture with physical controls, keyboards, and moving parts. It wasn’t lack of consumer demand that killed the phono jack.
There is no option to buy them. That’s the point.
Would you pay $1000 for one? Economy of scales matters…
Plus everyone who did look at them would say it is smaller it should cost less! Even though a smaller phone would be more technically challenging to build. Next you have compromises. No matter what you take out to make it work. People would bitch, I need that! I don’t need this other thing! Next battery life, people complain about current battery life, you think they want less?
I could go on, but I can easily see why manufacturers don’t want to deal…
Zenfone 8 and 9 are valid options, I’m using one rn
I’m probably gonna annoy people with this but I will shout it from the rooftops
Unihertz makes one.
obviously they did exist. why do you think phone manufacturers would stop making them if they were as profitable as the other sizes?
It used to be the only thing you could buy. Then they started making bigger phones. Now everyone buys those instead. They stopped making them because people stopped buying them, not the other way around.
Why can’t we have both? I want a bigger phone. Bigger than what I have now, and many people would consider this to be a fairly large phone.
But I don’t want to stop people who want smaller phones from having those, too.
You can already get big phones though.
They’re saying the smartphone market is too homogenous and there should be more options so that people actually have a choice in the device they buy.
Yeah, but most cries (including this article) aren’t “We want both” but “We want small instead”. The article goes out of its way to ridicule “huge” phones.
The battle cry seems to be demanding it their way instead of variety.
Not big enough.
Right? Everybody has different size hands, my hands are on the larger side and these bigger phones of today are actually pretty comfortable to me
I have fairly small hands, but still prefer a larger phone. More content on the screen and space for battery.
HOWEVER, I’d take both. A small phone would be a good secondary device. I want something modern the size of my Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830i). The back also has a really nice texture.
Oh, yeah, it also has a headphone jack, MicroSD card slot and quickly swappable battery which I should probably replace because it seems it has slightly increased its capacity… volumetric capacity.But I also prefer a bit more thickness so it doesn’t feel like a fragile, slippery sheet of glass (rugged phones are good for that).
I’d like to see more options out there. But there are reasons it could be difficult. I’ve been a software dev for 25 years and we’ve had take our software from local installs to web services, then mobile web services or responsive interfaces for all screen sizes. Then mobile APPs came along… and we do have to decide which devices and screen sizes we’re going to support. It’s hard to justify spending 20% more time so that you can support 2% more people. And for my app anyway that’s how many tablet users we have. 2%. So we’ve never done tablets, period. If we had to support some phones that were 3x the size of others, that would be kinda hard too, and we’ll always choose to spend the bulk of our time where the bulk of our users are.
Just a real answer. Supporting different screen sizes isn’t free.
This author should’ve spent digging into the iPhone 12 / 13 mini, and how it was received in Apple communities a few years ago.
That experiment really showed that the small phone demographic is passionate and vocal, but small (no pun intended). Those phones sold well when the small-phone-fans ran out to buy them, but the sales numbers cooled off quick.
Given that Apple is working on a lightweight 17 “air” phone, my guess is that they learned screen size is too important for too many people, but they’re going to see if they can strike a middle ground with weight / pocket fit.
The 12 mini had really poor battery life. I have the normal 12 myself, and even that one has underwhelming battery life, but the mini was way worse. Don’t know about 13, but I would hope that recent advances in chip efficiency and battery technology would allow for making small phones with good battery life. Just please make it a little chonkier if you have to.
I had my 13 mini for two years, and in that time I never once felt like the battery was on the way out. At worst it would be around 20% when I went to bed.
Why can’t we go back to small phones?
I think this is correlation, not causation, as this was also when touch screens started being made
it’s also when mobile media in general was available on your phone. tv, movies, YouTube, games, everything. not everything is about porn.
not everything is about porn.
You speak only for yourself.
I definitely was looking at porn on my 240x320 Nokia screen.
240x320
One boob takes up 76000 of your 76800 pixels.
You overestimate the resolution of porn back then. 90s kids needed some imagination to fill in the gaps…
Oh, I remember. Full res pic above the collar bone, then that weird speckled rendering for a couple lines and then… grey.
Sexy sexy nibbles the snake
I want a repairable phone. A phone where I can replace the battery
I’m curious, how repairable? Like comfortable with a solder iron or slots and what not like a PC?
Repairable phones would be great but the demand for them hasn’t undone the cost of design for them. There’s a lot of tech in an incredibly small package, so repairable phone would still require people to have specialty equipment to repair.
Like very few people own an oven for working with BGA chips. And if we go with socket based chips, the thickness of the phone has to increase or the battery has to decrease.
Don’t get me wrong, I think an open and repairable phone would be great. But having one is an engineering challenge that most phone makers have opted to just skip putting dollars into because the demand for one doesn’t justify the cost. Your average buyer is just chasing shiny and doesn’t see repairing their dinosaur as valuable.
But yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty here that would love such a device. Sadly we are not the majority.
It’s sad that people have gotten used to just throwing away stuff instead of repairing it. Sure, some repairs really aren’t worth it - like the screen I’d gotten replaced of my LG G3 that was prone to have this defect with its screen regardless of screen swaps and whatnot - but most of the time, it’s just minor things that can actually be fixed by non-tech savvy person.
I think it should be of paramount importance that more companies are held accountable as to the amount of waste they’re producing and how much they’re contributing to pollution and waste around the globe. Unfortunately, capitalism is a thing, so that’s not gonna happen.
Having repairable options for those that do care is awesome, though. If I could afford, I’d gladly go for a Fairphone if I ever need to replace my current phone (still going strong after 5 years of use). Until their mass appeal, they’ll likely remain out of my pockets.
Replacing SMT components would fall outside of repairability for 99.99999% of people. More realistically things like ports, screens, and batteries should be replaceable since they’re typically connected to the main board with cables. Furthermore ICs going back on a phone is probably extremely rare while the above mentioned items are very common failure points.
Imo I don’t think the goal is/should be “every part is repairable by any average person without tools” tbh. Like that would be awesome but it also isn’t realistic, like you said phones are super complicated. But making simple repairs – stuff like swapping a battery – possible for anybody is realistic imo, and then the rest should be as easy to repair as possible for local shops or someone who does have the necessary skills and equipment. At least personally I feel like that’s a good spot to aim for.
I really wanted to buy the Fairphone 5, but they don’t ship replacement parts to where I live which makes the entire concept pointless.
Forward shipping exists.
Unsure why you were downvoted. This is true
For being too forward, maybe?
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OK, so that’s a possibility, but when you start adding a ~$30 fee on top of the cost of the part and shipping from Fairphone you’re looking at about $100 per repair, which stops making sense pretty quickly. You’re better off spending a little more money on a good device that is dust- and moisture-sealed and taking care of it for a few years.
Makes sense. But you can offset part of the shipping from the fact that you can easily do the repair yourself.
Another possibility would be the HMD Skyline. Less repairable than Fairphones, but still far easier than most other smartphones. Only 2 years of updates though.
But starting from 2027, a removable battery will be mandatory for all smartphone in the EU, which mean most, if not all smartphone will switch to removable battery. This may also make repair a lot easier.
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And screen. And buttons.
I also want something that’s supported more than 3 years so there’s a point to repairing it. Ideally, support should come from the community so it can be infinite as long as someone is willing to do the work.
Based on https://postmarketos.org/install/ the Nokia N900 can run the latest stable release of PostmarketOS.
Nokia N900 was a proper Linux-powered phone released in November 2009.
So yeah, it’s been getting over 15 years of community support so far.
Edit: Fixed typo
What’s wrong with Fairphone then? Think I’m gonna buy FP 6 when it arrives
No Jack.
I’ve also been looking at FP but I believe there are some issues of getting one outside of Europe.
We only get FF 4 here (US), and through a reseller (Murena). And my understanding is that there are caveats in the bands it supports.
I am in the US, and bought my FP5 through clove technologies in the UK. I’m on T-Mobile and get 5G and everything.
I crossed them off the list after they ditched the headphone jack and the CEO tried to blow smoke up everyone’s ass as to why. Then they introduced their new Bluetooth headphones.
They are pretty expensive for the hardware.
Unless I’m misremembering don’t they charge flagship prices but have midrange specs?
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Thanks! I didn’t know that was part of their thing. I just thought they made the phones repairable. Has their supply chain been audited by a third party?
HMD (Nokia) Skyline has a cool feature where you unscrew 1 screw and can change various things like battery. Unfortunately phone itself is not impressive especially from OS update standpoint (only 2 year support for major Android versions). I would love to see this idea being copied by other manufacturers.
Unfortunately phone itself is not impressive especially from OS update standpoint
I swear to god manufacturers do this on purpose so that they can point to the low volume of sales and claim “See! People don’t really want these features” when in reality they’ve just slapped a couple good features onto a completely dog shit device.
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I bought a refurbished Xcover 6p and so far it’s great. There’s also the perks of being intended for companies: very long software support and pogo pin charging accessoires.
Ummm we did? My pixel 9 pro is noticably smaller than my pixel 6 pro, much to my delight. Maybe stop buying the XL tablet phones and you’ll find they’re actually a reasonable size again. So many people in the comments rallying against an issue that isn’t even there. You’re just being told this is an issue. Do you even check for yourselves?
this right here is the issue, people don’t even remember the size smartphone used to be. I’ve got a phone that’s one of the smallest available that still have decent hardware. the screen is still 6.1 inch. your example of a reasonable size is 6.3 inches.
what op and I are actually looking for is something around 5 - 5.3 inches instead, like smartphone used to be. For that size, all that is available today is no-name chinese phones with shit hardware and no support. the big brands are busy selling 6.2 inches as “compact” where it used to be considered phablet size
The “small” P9P is considerably larger than the iPhone 12/13 mini, which is the size OP wants. My mother-in-law has an iPhone 13 mini and it’s very small, but nearly as fully-featured as the standard iPhone 13, which is where other manufacturers keep missing the mark.
we can’t have small phones because the os design can only be so flexible before it starts either being crap at every size or having so many edge cases that internally it’s stupid complex.
having limited sizes means the sizes they do have can be well covered
What edge cases are you referring to? Screen size doesn’t matter if the resolution is the same.
it does if you want your buttons to be anything close to the size of your finger, or if you want the text to be readable (which is adjustable, but most people do not)
there is one option.
well and a couple others that are also made by Unihertz depending on your needs/wants
more companies making them would be cool but the general consensus I’m reading here is that there are 0 and that is incorrect.
Here’s what I want, roughly in order of priority:
- long term OS support
- repairable
- privacy friendly
- small
I currently have a Pixel 8:
- 7 years software support, maybe more
- 6/10 on ifixit score; not great, but better than many
- supports GrapheneOS
- on the smaller end of “normal” today
A community-supported Linux phone would be awesome, since I’d get 1 and 3 by default and 2 by convention, but they don’t meet my minimum needs from a phone: reliable basic feature support. Hopefully we get there by the time my Pixel dies.
And notably the pixel 8 is significantly smaller than the 7
You might be interested in the fairphone
My main complaint is that they don’t directly support the US. There’s a reseller here, but I think there are issues with some bands.
Maybe it’ll be better the next time I need a phone.
Plus they don’t support GrapheneOS. (or rather, GrapheneOS doesn’t support them due to it being too expensive to support more than one model while also not having the same hardware integrity measures that Pixels have) It’s the only thing stopping me from getting them for my next phone, because while I don’t necessarily need the fastest processor, highest resolution screen, etc, I do need a phone that won’t break over time until it becomes useless in a few years.
I’d be fine with /e/OS I think, GrapheneOS is nice, but not a hard requirement for me.
The Fairphone is interesting, but it is also enormous unfortunately
Consumers just aren’t that interested in a product that’s visibly cheaper and worse than what everyone else is carrying. And that is what a smaller phone signals.
Phones are a status purchase; they all do basically the same things, but most people gravitate towards higher end phones because they offer all the fancy features. Flagship phones are all large, so that’s what you see in the marketing. Just like you’ll never see a car company put its cheapest base model on a car catalog cover.
A smaller phone tends to cut corners; it’s not just smaller, but also functionally worse. While the price might be appealing, the potential customer also knows that using said phone will mean a worse experience, and might even get them ridiculed because they got ‘the cheap one’.
So we can absolutely go back to small phones - we just don’t want to. Smaller, cheaper, worse products just don’t appeal to a status-conscious buyer. If phone manufacturers offered the same specs at different sizes, that might change. But any savvy tech buyer knows a smaller phone is worse than the bigger one.
Back in the pre-smartphone days, size was a thing companies could compete on since customers wanted small, light, distinctive designs in premium materials. Like the Motorola Razr V3. These days, that just doesn’t work.
At least on the iPhone side the 12 and 13 mini were full flagships in a smaller form factor. I just wish we could go back to that
There is always the iPhone SE 3 with 4.7 inch display or the iPhone 16e with 6.1 inch display.
I had never heard of the 16e and checked their site, it will only allow comparison up to the 11, a phon from 2019. And its expensive.
That’s because it’s stupidly downgraded and aimed at people upgrading from the 11. It’s a no-one phone, there just to make people think, “well, the 15 is just $100 more, let’s buy that instead”. It would be a remarkable phone, if it were $200 cheaper. But Apple just can’t let an opportunity to scalp consumers go. Only Apple charges so much for a 60 Hz screen.
Yes. The 16e released only 2 days ago and it is an entry level version of the iPhone 16. And you are right, it is not that cheaper then the full-size version.
Its an entry iphone, I wouldnt say 16 given it shares very little with it.
Phones are a status purchase;
Bullshit, at least with the people I know. Literally nobody I know is interested in how much my phone cost me.
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Correct, as the article points out. Sites aren’t made with smaller screens in mind, and 62-68 percent of web traffic is made with phones.
Phones are not JUST a status thing, but having a better one is certainly more appealing to consumers, rather than a device that they and others know is purposefully gimped.
I see what you mean
I will say, when a company tries sometimes they can make small work really well:
There are opportunities to make small desirable. But I know people like their big trucks, I’m sure people like their big phones too.
