Because small phones have a small viewing area, which is a pain in the ass to see, especially as you get older. Which is why I prefer foldables. The more screen real-estate I can fit in my pocket, the better.
Because every time a manufacturer releases a small phone, nobody buys them.
Because most people use their phone as their main, if not only, device, so a bigger screen is more desirable to consume content.
I don’t want a small phone or a slide out keyboards.
I want :
Replaceable battery.
Non glass back.
3.5 jack.3.5 jack is easy, most budget phones have them (along with a MicroSD card slot)
The replaceable battery? That’s gonna be hard to find. There the obvious Fairphone, but its very costly for its specs and is only made for EU, and even if someone from the US imports it, the only US carrier allowing it is Tmobile.
Samsung Galaxy XCover series have IP67 Water resistance, headphone jack, and MicroSD card slot, and the replaceable battery, but its specs are not that good for its cost (as reported by various Reddit users).
I wouldn’t trust the water resistance tho. One drop into a puddle and the back comes off exposing the internals.
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.
Galaxy Xcover series.
“Why can’t we go back to small phones”
Company releases small phone
“No one” buys it
Company stops making small phones
People complaining why there are no small phones
Because apparently people want big phones.
For the last 10-15 years it’s been a boiling frog situation really - .1 or .2" increase every generation until 7" somehow becomes the norm (for a phone, not a tablet, mind you).
I wish there were more small hi-end phones too.
I do, I bought smallest phone available from known company. But most of those companies just decided you need huge phone that can’t fit everywhere, removed sdcard slot, removed headphone jack. Last time I remember nobody asked them to remove those features. I think it is the same enshittification like with everything, they no longer make cheap houses, smaller cheaper cars, actual budget gpus etc, etc. Feels like every company targets top 20% and the rest - gtfo and be damned.
people spend more time on their phones than ever before. its substituted sitting in front of a tv, so i guess people want bigger screens the same way they want bigger tvs.
How many times is this going to be regurgitated? The question has been well and truly answered.
We don’t buy them.
That, and small phones on the Android side are often nerfed beyond reason, like a bottom-of-the-barrel Mediatek SoC with low RAM and shit storage option instead of the bigger model’s Snapdragon and quality storage, or shit cameras, or garbage screen resolution, etc etc.
There is something to be said about the larger variant having more room for better cameras, but outside of that, the nerfing feels almost intentional.
Small size means a smaller battery. If they make the phone’s processor too powerful, the battery will run out in less than a day, and then everyone will be mad about that. There’s also less surface to dissipate heat.
Making things smaller is harder and more expensive, but people who want small phones don’t want to pay more than large phones.
Not to mention: the old people (the ones with money) can’t see them.
Removed by mod
They don’t care about “you”. They care about their “consumers” (as in, you in bulk), who don’t buy them.
It’s capitalism; simple as that.
But I want mine to have a goatee, why doesn’t apple give iPhone a goatee?
How many times is this going to be regurgitated?
OP is an iPhone user. They’re very used to their tiny phones and they love them and simply can’t understand why everyone wants a large phone.
It’s a blind take. If iPhone 16 Pro Max sold less than iPhoneSE, then they would still sell the latter.
But there is no comparison.
Why can’t we go back to small phones?
The iPhone SE is dead,
Is there any chance that you chose to lock yourself into a very small walled garden with a vendor who might make decisions about product that you might not agree with?
Apple is the only one making iOS phones, and Apple doesn’t seem interested in small devices anymore, so that door is shut.
Right. You stick yourself in that garden, you are gambling that the vendor is going to come out with the product that you want.
There are still a few niche companies working on smaller devices, like Unihertz, but those phones almost always have low-end hardware and limited software support.
Well, size is kind of a constraint on what hardware you can put in the thing.
If what you mean by “limited software support” is “apps are going to be optimized for the bulk of users and will probably feel small if the great bulk of users are using larger screens”, well…I mean, yeah.
The iPhone 3 SE you have:
4.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen LCD Multi‑Touch display with IPS technology
1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
Memory 4 GB LPDDR4X RAM
https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&nRamMin=8000&fDisplayInchesMax=5.5
Let’s grab one from that list:
https://www.gsmarena.com/ulefone_armor_mini_20t_pro-13298.php
Size 4.7 inches, 53.3 cm2 (~63.1% screen-to-body ratio)
Same screen size as your phone.
Resolution 720 x 1600 pixels, 20:9 ratio (~373 ppi density)
30 pixels narrower, but 266 pixels taller than your phone.
8GB RAM
Twice the memory of your phone.
Can buy online in the US:
https://www.amazon.com/Ulefone-Armor-Mini-20T-Pro/dp/B0DJ74TQXT
And it was released October 2024, so it’s pretty new.
Now, you may not be able to get an iOS phone that fits your hardware wants, but them’s the breaks when you go with a platform that has only a single vendor making hardware for it.
RAM is a horrible indication of phone performance imo.
The A15 chip in the iPhone 3 SE absolutely destroys the Dimensity 6300 chip in the 8GB phone you linked
A lot of people had liked iPhone because for the longest time android phones were not able to compete in the cpu/gpu space especially around the time of the iPhone 11.
Although now at the high end android phones are much closer together in performance so it’s more about what features you care about more between the phones.
The truth is though that it’s not an apple-specific thing. On the android side Asus was the last large phone maker to ship modern small phones, and even they have taken over their zenfone line (small phones line) with a large phone for the ZenFone 11.
Based on reports from companies, it sounds like the market is just not there, at least not big enough to warrant the R&D compared to “regular” phones which make them good money.
“walled garden” - how many 5.4” android phones can you name from the current decade?
I agree, it’s like the author is saying “why this public-market company I trusted blindly is not doing what I (minority) want?”
I’m not gonna lie, as a 6’4" guy, I can’t stand small phones. I understand that I’m an outlier though, and wish there were more options to cater to more people.
people spend a third of their lives on those things. And while cumbersome, a big screen simply is better for media consumption
only way I see smaller phones make a comeback is if we change our habits or if a new technology comes along
I would rather spend this time on a device with a 15’ screen and a comfortable keyboard. A phone is just that - a secondary device. That needs to be comfortable to hold and type on with one hand while the other holds onto the subway railing.
A phone is just that - a secondary device
I don’t know. more than 60% of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and it keeps increasing
A bigger screen is better for text consumption, too. Perhaps especially for that. If you don’t know why, just wait ;D
Seriously as a person getting on in years I always bump up the font size. And if you do this on a mini phone, you run out of usable space immediately.
I wish there were small phone options, too, but I can see why big is the default.
new technology comes along
I believe the RAZR foldables allow you to do almost anything on the front screen, and in the latest iterations the front screen is larger than Samsung’s.
If they’re going to make only bog phones they could at least bring back all the hardware features they’ve removed over the years.
I think it’s a psychological thing.
Like, while thinking about what kind of phone we want - a small phone sounds pretty good. But when it comes time to buy it, we start comparing phones, and we see some small ones, and some slightly bigger ones, and some really big ones. We tend to go bigger than we’d originally intended because of psychological anchoring effects.
The slightly bigger phone is seen as a slightly better phone. “not too big” we think, as we compare it to some monsters; and the key stats such as screen resolution and battery capacity sound slightly better. So we tend to buy that bigger phone even if it isn’t what we actually thought we wanted.
[edit] I should say that I’m saying “we” in a totally generic way. I definitely don’t do this myself. I’ve literally only ever owned smartphone in my life, and it isn’t particularly big or flashy. I have an anti-phone attitude.
I’m just waiting for smart watches to get bigger and bigger and eventually lose the strap.
