I consider that to be a good reminder that there is no free lunch: If you build such a small smartphone, you suddenly don't have enough space behind the screen for a flat battery anymore, forcing you to increase the depth of the device to fit an adequate battery. You then end up with a device with a similar volume as one with a larger screen.
The iPhone SE was a good size but had terrible battery life from day one.
I’m now using an iPhone 7, and it too has terrible battery life, with the added benefit that if I take it out of its case I cannot hold on to it for a sustained period because it’s so thin and has no real edges to speak of, just large diameter radii.
I don't want the best camera or the fastest cpu. Can live with a tiny display. Just give me something that can run Android 10 reasonably well in a tiny package and you have my money.
I love Sony's phones, but their product naming confuses me to no end...
Anyway, I was thinking of the original mini line not the later compact line. The first mini, "x10 mini", was too small to run the standard Android launcher so I would prefer the newer slightly larger "mini":
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-SE-2020,...
[1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x10_mini_pro-3...
I love the size and convenience. I find the keyboard surprisingly good for such a small screen. For my purposes: occasional call, signal message, GPS/GoogleMaps it is perfect.
I'd be happy to drop money for a phone this size provided it can last all day. The whole point of a small phone is not to think about it - including having to charge it halfway through your day.
> The app, named "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar," was developed by TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company that among other things owns the Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm brands.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659871
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-preinstalled-on-...
I have the first one and it's great for the gym or running. However removing the rear backing and battery to swap my phone's sim card into is a pain (so that I don't have to pay for two phone plans when I only use this one a few hours a week), as is the micro USB charging and the lack of fingerprint reader and the smaller battery.
Using them once in a while is probably ok, but I think the internal electronics of a phone are not rated or tested for such constant “abuse”
Battery life was hours. It wasn’t safe to take to work because it’d be dead in an hour of listening to music on the commute.
Phone call quality was so poor my family and coworkers went mutiny. I could hear them fine but the mic was awful, apparently.
The screen was so, so small that it took a long time to type, and was fraught with mistakes. I realized there is such a thing as too small.
Every picture taken was uselessly blurry.
Overall it felt like the early 2000s.
I would greatly be willing to try again. I need to upgrade this iPhone SE. Call me crazy, but having a phone that fits in my pocket, no matter what I’m wearing - that’s the best feature a phone could have.
if audio drains the battery then there is a serious design flaw
https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/jelly
I use a Sony XZ1C now, though. The battery lifetime of the Jelly was a problem when I was travelling, and at 52 years I need a bit larger fonts. I wonder whether to get this one, though... Unihertz rocks, the phone supports the android upgrade stuff (DSU), the battery might just be big enough for me, AND: I loved the way the Jelly just wasn't a timewaste magnet. It let me run apps, very functional.
Their bundled software is quite glitchy but what I could not forgive, is that they don't provide the source code, which I heard was some kind of a GPL violation but they don't care.
I used it for about 3 or 4 months and then the new SE came out.
Served it's purpose, but looking back, using it feels like it was some sort of penance.
I'm so close to just buying a second hand Nexus 5, i'm so over all these phablets.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zngpz4/prison-phones-that...
This is for people who want to fit the phone in a pocket, and don't want to use it often. The kind of person who needs to have google authenticator available, and wants to never ever spend time browsing instagram. A sort of person I want to be ;)
The Palm phone is 97mm * 51mm * 7mm, so it's smaller (particularly a lot thinner) than the Jelly 2.
Still, it's wonderful to see more options in the pocket-sized phones!! A vastly under-served market.
I bought the Palm phone after it was discussed here a month or so back. Very happy with it, actually fits in my pocket and I can't feel it's there.
Pro tip. Have your credit card info saved in your kickstarter account so you don't end up like me.
The same as every single other Jelly product.
I'll never understand kickstarter.
edit: you're probably able to find the exact model of phone they're rebadging if you search for its oddball screen resolution, I just grabbed the name of the first miniphone that looked similar.
What are the chances some new small phone prototyper is going to do this properly to the point I trust it enough that the novelty of something smaller is more valuable than not getting hacked and monitored?
