I'm kind of sad that the world seems to have given up on the smaller phones. The marketing of the masculine hand holding the larger phone is amusing to me, and I can understand wanting to have a larger screen. I do not like the amount of space these things take in my pocket, though.
Yes, that is also my anecdata (women with giant phones in their purses, or even wearing the phone as a purse). I have an iPhone 12 mini, really don't want anything bigger, but perhaps I'll go for a good watch and buds that can be online without a phone and also leave the giant phone in the bag most of the day, that would mean great battery life, less phone in hand, less distraction perhaps?
I've wanted to ditch the iPhone/Macbook and go watch/airpods/ipad for years now. They need to decouple the requirement to own an iPhone to get a watch up and running (this should be something an iPad can do), and make the iPad an actual pro dev machine. Not sure I'm ever going to get my wish, sadly.
Apple could sell $200 "indulgence" NFC dongles secured by T2 enclaves.
Tap enough sacrificial indulgences on a neutered iPad or Watch, and it will software-unlock obvious convergence functionality, whose artificial absence now proliferates physical devices and environmental expense.
Straight facts. I have a purse, hip bag, or small backpack on me everywhere so the size is pretty much irrelevant so long as I can type on the keyboard with two hands. I would use the hell out of a 3DS XL sized folding phone.
I will say that the folding screen seems like a gimmick on the "2.5 phones taped together" size. For compact flip phones it makes sense tho.
Sure, for some women, but let's not generalize. Personally, I hate carrying a purse, and the new phones don't even fit in the pocket inside my purse.
Plus, I miss being able to reach the entire screen with one thumb, with the phone held in one hand. I do admit to typing two-handed, sometimes, but damn I wish I didn't NEED to! I can barely reach the left side of the screen reliably, much less the top left corner. :(
Unfortunately the market has consistently spoken - small phones simply don't sell. Nobody could sustain it. Whether or not it's because the generalization is accurate or not is moot.
I have pretty average man hands (although my fingers might be a bit long) and I use a Note 8 one handed without really any problem. Honestly, I like it even if just for the fact I tended to drop smaller phones a lot more.
Based on that, I would expect half the men to be able to use even the biggest non-fold phones one handed without any problem.
What really annoys me is that that there are like dozens of Android phones on sale in major stores right now, from different manufacturers, and they are all the same. All featureless ~6 inch slabs where the only difference seems to be the arrangement of the camera lenses on the back, even on the software side they are all pretty much the same.
I understand that we have found some kind of an optimum, that it is the form that sells the best and what most people want, but with so many manufacturers and models, there should be room for some niches. Where is the craziness from the early days? All the gadgets Samsung was known for, the physical keyboards, the small phones, the huge phones, the styluses, etc...
It seems the only exceptions you can find are overpriced folding phones, and some rugged phones. You may get a few more options from brands most people never heard of, usually only available online, often directly from China. But even with that, if you want something that doesn't have the iPhone form factor, your options are very limited.
If 100 different phones are available, it would be nice if one of them was for 1% of the people who want something different.
For many years - I don't know whether it's still the case as I'm out of the industry now - the major mobile operators in the US had (increasing) requirements about the minimum fraction of the front of the phone that was covered by the screen. They also had requirements for battery life. Given geometry and minimum-practical bezel sizes, both of those factors led toward larger phones.
I broke my iPhone 12 mini and part of me died that day. A tired dad moment – set the phone on the trunk lid when getting my kid in the car and then later opened the trunk. It slid down and crunched in the hinge.
I could replace it with another mini but have been holding out hope for another updated version. I love the small form factor, even at the expense of battery life and camera quality. I just want a reasonable phone with solid hardware that fits in my pocket.
In the beginning, smartphones were all tiny, because it was universally agreed that smaller cell phones were better.
Then there was a huge, neverending push to make phones as large as possible, or larger. Sometimes smaller phones have been offered as an unpopular option, but more often "enormous" is the minimum size.
And as long as that's been going on, people have been complaining that they want their phone to fit in their hand.
Stipulate that a majority seems to feel that there's no need for a phone to fit in your hand. Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones? Shirts come in all different sizes. How much does it cost to design an additional size of phone?
(Related: ever since the switch to 16:9 laptop screens, everyone has been complaining to no avail about the inferior dimensions of the screen. Why are manufacturers still cramming them down our throats? This one isn't even a case where people prefer 16:9 to 16:10.)
The best form factor of any smartphone I've owned is the first one, the Nexus S: 63mm wide, 124mm tall, and the back popped off to make replacing the battery convenient.
Phones have gotten steadily worse, as far as usability goes, ever since. There's more computing power, but I have trouble believing that's what's driving the shape.
>Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones?
They don't sell.
Apple killed the iPhone mini due to low sales. Asus replaced the universally lauded Zenfone 10 with a very large Zenfone 11. Google increased the size of the Pixel 6 when compared to its predecessor. Sales also increased.
It's weird though that there apparently isn't a market for even one high-end small phone, from any manufacturer.
I wonder if to some extent they're not different enough. The iPhone mini has a 5.4" screen. Not so long ago we managed well enough with 4" iPhone screens. I wonder how a 4.5" version would sell - call it the iPhone Nano.
Unfortunately a lot of apps don't support those smaller screen sizes so well anymore. But people who want a small phone that's easy to carry around, who won't be using it for hours a day, don't always need many apps.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll occasionally re-introduce a mini phone like McDonald's does with the McRib.
Somewhere there's gotta be numbers that show "there are people who buy minis, but they only buy a phone every few years, so let's make a mini every third model year" or something.
It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version. The amount of profit they were getting from the mini wasn't enough compared to the regular model, and they correctly deduced that if they eliminated the mini, everyone would just buy the larger model instead so they could decrease their manufacturing and design costs.
If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone? Or would you just bite the bullet and get the larger iPhone after the mini is discontinued? Apple knows that 99.99% of Apple users are in the second group.
> If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone?
I would never be an Apple user.
And that's relevant here, because this argument doesn't apply to Android users, and yet Android phone manufacturers are just as insistent on not making smaller phones.
> It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version.
I really wanted a 12 mini but the shortened battery life made it a no-go for me. Ended up with a standard 12 and am still happy with it years later aside from it being slightly larger than I would like.
16:9 is a compromise ratio for content viewing.
It fits both 4:3 TV content and 2.40:1 movie content.
Once 16:9 widescreen was popular media started adopting it natively
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16:9_aspect_ratio#History
That link is quite explicit that the idea of making 16:9 screens is to save money because they're smaller than 16:10s:
> In 2011, Bennie Budler, product manager of IT products at Samsung South Africa, confirmed that monitors with a native resolution of 1920 × 1200 were not being manufactured anymore. "It is all about reducing manufacturing costs. The new 16:9 aspect ratio panels are more cost-effective to manufacture locally than the previous 16:10 panels".
> since a 16:9 is narrower than a 16:10 panel of the same length, more panels can be created per sheet of glass
This is why people complain. "We've decided to charge the same amount for a worse product" isn't a winning message.
It also does some weird editorializing:
> By July 2022, 16:9 resolutions are preferred by 77% of users (1920 × 1080 with 67%; 2560 × 1440 with 10%). [In the Steam Hardware Survey]
Steam's hardware survey, of course, doesn't even address the question of what users prefer.
I keep an eye on sites selling refurbished iPhone SE, the first one! : )
Shipping with new battery for extra (...unsure if I'd trust that battery though).
That one I can still use for phonecalls and occasional practical things I need when away from desk and computer.
And the irony about decent hardware is that all have decent hardware from the past 10-15 years, only the software that is crap on garbage and can't use hardware that could have been excellent mainframes some decades ago in some secret nuclear research laboratory. Need a powerstation now to present and scroll bitmaps and some text.
bought a 15- bearing in mind that the 12 mini was also too large for me (5s was perfect).
15 Pro has been dropped many more times, can’t be operated with one hand at all. It’s the first time I had to have a replacement screen actually- after owning iPhones for 15 years.
Anyway… I’m considering going back to the 5s. I would only miss wireless charging and apple wallet I think. (and apps are now made for the larger screen and will have elements that are inaccessible due to going passed the edges of the display).
I ordered and sent back a Pixel 7 because it was so large/heavy compared to what I was used to. Ended up buying a refurbed Pixel 5 (the model before Google introduced the new camera bar design) that's still kicking, been very happy.
Looks like they've gotten the Pixel 9 a bit smaller than the 7 but still the same weight. It's still larger than the Pixel 5 too.
This has been brought up in the past and Apple did try to cater to that market with their smaller phone and it seemed the market response was not great, they ultimately had to drop the iPhone mini because it was not worth it.
I’m sure there are many out there like me, but I used to prefer smaller phones until I used a larger phone for one generation; after trying to move back to a smaller phone, I just missed the real estate of a larger screen.
I am male with large palm and fingers but a 6.5" phone is simply unusable for being a phone. Pocket? Haha, probably a small sachet, weights 0.2kg, comedic on the face for calling, all the folks lost their minds completely giving 1000$ for such a parody?! It can't even sit stable on the desk for f's sake. Pretentius fragile money pit garbage all.
Just set up a new Android with 6.5" size and I am in a particularly bad mood now. Wasting my hours on ...this! The process itself is infuriating, zillions of 'features' just wasting my time reading how über-user-focused are so set it up NOW! while tap-tap-tap-tap-tap for seemingly into eternity, beyond comfortable by an ocean plus a half, but watch for this and accept that and log in and register here and connect that and you will be amazed, allow us to take your data, don't worry, we care, we say it repeatedly so it must be like that, right?, here are two dozens of icons be amazed about, wow how many icons are there it is amazing, amazing multiplied, word-editor-assistant-presentation-maker-tv-communication-console-education-news-pretty-sleepwithme-and-tap-me-tap-me-day-and-nigh-oh-yes, into eternity, but first allow this and allow that, just one more, read that, we improve your experience so do it do it, do it again and again, soon we get there, oh wait, camera MUST have discovery of nerby devices otherwise closes itself, hmmm, not something on my old Pentax, that's new kind of development in the history of photography, watching for nearby bicycle or toaster or whatever...
Users have no self respect nowadays, none!, and swallow whatever manufacturers stomp down their throats in the dozen, repeatedly. It is good this thing was the cheapest, I did not dare discovering past 8 years' development on high price, and will only be used as a small tablet at home apart from being a guinea pig, not good for anything else (without satisfying its attention hungry distracting barrage of time wasting functional nothingness). Maybe navigation from time to time, but unsure, heavier than some travel books!
I know that eventually I'll need to replace the 4a (security) but every time I look at phones I just can't find anything that I would actually want to use instead, and I also resent price increases that remove features I use (headphone jack).
I discovered about the Unihertz Jelly Star the other day which is allegedly the smallest android phone with a 3 inch display. People over /r/dumbphone seem to like it as a mean to make doom scrolling less appealing to them while the phone can still be used to do all you need like use Uber (although android auto on this must be horrible).
At 309 CAD on Amazon, I'm tempted to give it a try.
At this point it's probably irreversible. Even if someone will release small phone, apps developers will ignore it and their apps will not be very usable on those phones.
I guess only Apple can pull that, but they're not interested either. Their latest "Mini" model is still huge.
I'm curious about those Samsung flip phones that, instead of flipping open like a book, flip shut into a square like a 90s flip phone. I don't really want to buy one, but I like the idea a lot.
I can see wanting a smaller phone. That is an underserved market segment. But implying that phone marketing is patriarchy-driven is laughably absurd. Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
I read that they need to use gigantic manly man hands for the gigantic phones, because otherwise people would realize that it's a "two-handed" phone for most of us mere mortals, that's impossible to use with one hand for anything but the most basic tasks.
> Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
How can that be true when there's only 2 phone OSes of note and one single company sells half the phones in the US? There's not enough diversity in the market to create the conditions for diverse marketing.
If anything it's a race to the middle. When there are 2 shops in town, they tend to become more similar not more diverse.
Apologies, I meant my comment as a dig on the old idea that the larger phone is for men. It genuinely amused me that they used different hands to hold the phone. Especially since I have no real concept looking at that page on how big it would be in my hands.
And note that this was a serious criticism a few years ago where it was a complaint that all things are designed for 6' men by default. I don't know if that is still the general belief, but it got a ton of traction for at least a short while. I would be surprised if there aren't a fair number of folks that still think that.
