I want an iPhone Mini-sized iPhone again.
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.
I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
161–170 of 702 posts
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 al…
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…
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.
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#163same
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#164I used the iPhone SE 1 until January of this year, it was such a great phone and a great form factor. I wrote an article about it to send it off: https://blog.bschwind.com/2025/01/11/the-original-iphone-se-...
I still have mine as the bedside Hacker News browsing device. It is so much nicer to use than iPhone 13 mini which I use as my main phone :(
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#165My 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 mi…
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…
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".
What's going on?
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#166I 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.
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#167Heck, I want a new iPhone mini sized iPhone. I am stubbornly sticking to my iPhone 12 Mini because it is the form factor I really want.
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they are awkward and cumbersome to use. For you. As someone with large hands, I appreciate that phones grew in size and I swapped to larger devices as soon as I could.
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.
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#169You can't even buy an iPhone-mini-sized iPhone anymore.
Get used to making calls on a TV tray, and walking around looking like a schlub in cargo shorts for the rest of your life.
Re: I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
#170It 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.