Comment by davee5
4 years ago
Hi Eric, I'm a hardware startup guy myself (our paths have crossed) with the distinction that my own "very specific set of skills" has been honed at smartphone megacompanies and smartphone startups. OSOM, Essential, HTC, Samsung, Apple. I've designed and built a lot of phones. I'm building one now. I think this is a noble effort, I personally prefer pocketable phones too, but I think there are nigh-insurmountable hurdles in your paths forward.
- 1. Supply chain / component R&D -
You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch. If you end up doing this as your own startup then you're going to start by trying to buy off the shelf parts to keep costs down. But that display you want is simply not on any of the development roadmaps for the major component manufacturers. The industry has its own momentum, and the component suppliers have also been looking at the trendlines so they are building bigger and bigger.
If you can't find the screen you want in a catalogue then you have to pay someone to build it. Convincing BOE et. al that your phone will sell enough to pay off R&D costs is unlikely, so be prepared to pay several million bucks in NRE to make it worth their time (it might still not be) and the wait a year for them to spin up the fabs. So ~$5M and 9-18 months later you have a display.
- 2. Big players are uninterested, not uninformed -
Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring, and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly. I've been in the meetings, small phone advocacy goes nowhere.
Also I'm a little surprised you're hoping an online petition will work after your prior experience trying to influence your acquirers. I presume you saw the inside of Fitbit / Google and how decisions are made...
> Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring
I would argue that they don’t know what people want at all, since market data just reinforces previously held assumptions. For example if you surveyed people in 2006 what kind of phone they wanted, most consumers would probably ask for a better flip phone. It wasn’t until Apple came along and defined a new market that Smartphones even became a thing in the mainstream consciousness.
Smaller screened smartphones aren't a new market that needs to be defined though. Most people know what they are by virtue of having lived through the era that they were the only choice.
And as OP pointed out, Apple makes a smaller screened smartphone, so they exist. In some comment on this post someone said that it accounts for 3% of Apple's phone sales.
How big is the group of people that want a smaller smart phone but aren't willing or able to switch to Apple? Who knows. My intuition says not many, but maybe we'll find out through OP's efforts. I'm an iPhone user and the only reason I haven't switched to something like the iPhone Mini is because I want the better camera on the pro's.
I suspect there are two constraints working against mini mobiles:
1. The industry push for thin due to the consumer dislike of thick.
2. The invisible consumer expectation that smaller mobiles should be cheaper.
A mini screen with a fat body (large battery, good camera) is what many functionally oriented people should want, but cost and form will limit consumer desire and make it an extremely niche product?!?
Edit: I am thinking more Canon IXUS cross bred with a 20000mAh powerbank and stock Android One. In fact Canon or another reliable camera brand would be the perfect manufacturer. Fat and robust could work: sell the functionally ugly to practical tradesmen type? Unfortunately writer desires thin and light, which I don’t care about. No need for front-facing camera, instead put a 1” (4:3?) screen on the side of the main camera to allow for pointing/framing when doing selfies.
Functionally oriented people often have other constraints. I have tight constraints for mobiles: I am price sensitive (I break or lose phones), I want vanilla Android (manufacturer skinned often has broken upgrades & broken privacy & broken features), and I generally won’t buy products from extremely niche brands (unpredictable reliability, & trust issues).
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Apple's limited success is not only a factor of the screen size but also market positioning. The mini is inferior in some specs to other iPhones but at the same time really high end as far as mobiles in general go. That makes it a niche product even if screen size was not a factor at all.
It targets people that have plenty of cash for a flagship but are willing to forego the top tier specs for a smaller size. Apple prefers you just buy the pro. And if you don't have much cash you can get the reheated 2017 iphone 8 with SE slapped on it :)
I bet if they made a mini T the price of an SE with a more limited camera and screen spec than the current mini it would take 50% of SE sales away.
You can't judge the market viability of one aspect based on a single model.
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> How big is the group of people that want a smaller smart phone but aren't willing or able to switch to Apple?
It just feels like surely capturing 100% of the market for premium small Android phones (there really are none right now) must be at least as good as yet another large Android phone entering a market full of large Android phones.
None of the leaked specs (if real) for iPhone 14 include a "Mini" variant, so it looks like Apple killed theirs.
I'm going to buy a 13 Mini because of Apple's long term support, so it should last me a good few years.
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“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford.
However, in this day and time when it comes to established tech such as a smart phone, sometimes the best way to 'innovate' might be to give people what they actually want. Sure not all companies can cater all niches. But hopefully someone will! Im also a small phone advocate.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford.
Just a note that this quote, and a similar one by Steve Jobs (‘Market research could never have given us the Macintosh’) are amongst the most misinterpreted in history. Most people see them as saying ‘market research is useless’ - what both were actually saying is that you need to take a new innovation to the customer and _then_ ask them what they think of it.
So no, don’t just flat out ask people what they want - but intuit and give people a little taste of what they could have - and then ask them what they think.
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Also horses that could run at 100mph for 5 hours at a time would be far better than early cars. They run on clean renewable fuel, have built in natural intelligence to avoid crashes and carry drunk drivers, and come in a variety of pleasing colors (not just black!).
The main benefit of cars was that if you delay maintenance your transportation doesn’t die.
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There’s still a market for faster horses.
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>For example if you surveyed people in 2006 what kind of phone they wanted, most consumers would probably ask for a better flip phone.
Better flip phone would be good too.
Samsung make one called the Z-flip. Way too expensive for me, but to me it's the better flip phone I've been waiting for since 2005!
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Apple has market data - they sold a premium small phone for two years. Rumors are that they will be discontinuing them this year.
It was almost premium. Still didn't had Pros camera.
Real example was Pixel until version 4. The only difference between smaller and bigger versions was the obvious screen and battery.
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Last month I had to use an Essentials PH-1 phone for a day while i waited for a new phone. It was the perfect size for me and the build quality was really nice. Unfortunately, the OS was outdate and the specs not as high. It has 4GB RAM, Snapdragon 825, 13MP camera @ 2160p and a 5.7" display.
It looked premium, it felt premium and was the perfect size. If someone could pack more punch with specs in that phone I would buy it for even $1k.
I’ve owned smart phones since the treo.
I’ve owned blackberry phones, windows mobile, even a palm pre.
I’ve had nearly every iPhone since launch.
I’m on an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Nothing makes me yearn for a smaller screen.
I held an iPhone 3G in my hand last week after finding it in a drawer and was amazed at how it felt too small to be really useful these days.
My gal has a 13 pro max.
My folks have larger phones.
My siblings have larger phones.
My friends, colleagues, business partners, clients, all have larger phones.
The biggest complaint I hear is battery life.
I hope small screen fans find what they want but I do not believe it’s a big market.
The reason it's not a big market is that if glove-sizing worked the same way as phones, you'd have people with small glove size walking around in ginormous gloves. That's not the case because glove sizing actually behaves rationally, as opposed to truck-sizing, where every human in America wants a ginormous truck regardless of their actual need. Sadly, phones follow trucks, not gloves, because the former is ego-driven, not need-driven. Apple deserves credit for recognizing the counter-example to its own market presence and engages fully around it while no competitor follows suit.
Agreed. When I bought the original Samsung Galaxy Note, my friends all thought it was hilariously, ridiculously, impractically large. It was smaller than my current Pixel 5.
Yes, this phone is hard to use one handed, but the value of the large screen outweighs everything else.
"They" say that people just don't by the smaller iPhone. People always go for the larger + cheaper thing.
Apple has weird economics where I'm sure they profit handsomely from iPhone Mini, but they tend to get rid of things if they don't make $10b annually.
> most consumers would probably ask for a better flip phone
I'm not sure about that, sidekicks, plan and blackberry were pretty popular and gaining a lot of mainstream interest for modern 'smartphone' type things
Unfortunately it has been tested. Rumors say that there won't be an iPhone 14 mini. (Sent from an iPhone 12 mini).
Slate phones were already a trend before the iPhone.
> people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly
I'll be blunt: no I won't. I reluctantly bought the phone I still use (a moto X4) back in 2019, at which point it was already getting old. It was one of the smaller Android phones available at the time; I measured it diagonally corner to corner (including bezel) at 159 mm (6.26 inches). The screen size is 130 mm (5.2 in) according to Wikipedia. This phone is in fact much too big for me, and I'm not happy with it.
But I will be sticking with this phone into the indefinite future: until it breaks, becomes unusable, or a worthy replacement arises (a phone the size of the Nexus 5X or preferably smaller, with my must-have features). In the event I can't get this I will switch to a cheap feature phone since I need something for emergency use. I'll look into the mp3 player market to see if there's something I can use for playing music and audio books, maybe if I'm lucky there's something with a nice screen and an e-reader.
I'm sure you're right and some people are more willing to compromise than me. However, what also seems likely is that many people are somewhere in between and will wait until their current phone is unusable before reluctantly downgrading to whatever the latest model is. Surely plenty of sales are lost due to this.
Yeah, due to the ever-increasing difficulty of buying reasonably-sized phones, I've been keeping my phone longer and longer, well past the point of lag and annoyance where I'd prefer to buy a new one.... because there is no new one that I want. They're too big. They're worse for me than an out-of-support old phone that limps along and may require a third-party OS.
All told, I've probably bought less than half as many phones as I'd prefer. Yes, I do eventually buy one because they effectively are required nowadays, but that's quite a lot of money that isn't going into these company's hands.
Meanwhile, the rest of the market also seems to be lengthening their time between phone purchases..... and phone manufacturers respond by releasing bigger and more expensive phones year over year over year. I won't try to claim it's the majority of the cause, but surely there's some connection between those two.
> until it breaks, becomes unusable
I decided to die on a different hill-- physical keyboard. The blackberry keytwo wasn't perfect but it was definitely one of my favorite devices I've ever owned.
And now AT&T will no longer support phone calls on it. Planned obsolescence isn't so easy to run and hide from. They will dash your usable, friendly, pleasing devices from your hands and sneer at you for daring to want better.
PinePhone is the only phone I know of with a keyboard. It has lots of other issues that you might not be able to accept, but it is an option.
> > people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly
> I'll be blunt: no I won't.
Agreed. I used my 2005 Motorola Razr until 2020 because I have zero interest in an inconveniently large phone. When the Palm Phone came out I got it as a perfectly-sized replacement.
I won't ever go to a larger phone because if it doesn't fit my pocket, what's the point? Might as well not have one.
People who will happily continue using 15-year-old hardware are not a great market segment to target.
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> In the event I can't get this I will switch to a cheap feature phone since I need something for emergency use.
I tried switching to a feature phone and was surprised how often I use a smartphone; and how many people, banks, government organizations, restaurants, etc, assume that you have one.
Yes. COVID contact tracing in New Zealand nearly completely relied on QR-code sign-ins with an ios or android app, for example. My company has an app to manage my sick/annual leave in. Sure, there are fallbacks, but they're inconvenient and time or energy intensive in a way a phone isn't.
There are vanishingly small numbers of people who will insist on a perfect-or-nothing approach to smartphones. This market segment is unserviceable. Sure, the size will be right, but it won't have the right battery size, or the battery has to be swappable on-the-go, or it didn't have quite the right sd card option, or maybe the software isn't 'polished' enough, or it had to have two headphone jacks. There will be something 'not good enough' and therefore it's passed over even though they want a 'small' phone.
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> a phone the size of the Nexus 5X or preferably smaller
...so, a current flagship? Samsung's Galaxy S22 is smaller than both the Moto X4 and Nexus 5X.
Size comparison: https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Google-Nexus-5X,Motor...
In general, phone sizes have stayed roughly constant since the Nexus 5X, though the displays are getting bigger as the bezels get smaller.
Aha, you got me. I really should have specified that Nexus 5X was also too big.
Moreover, the specification that actually matters for one-handed phone users is the distance between the bottom corner of the phone (where it's held in the hand) and the top opposite corner of the screen, not the top corner of the phone. That's because that point is the furthest you'd ever need to stretch your thumb to use the phone. So actually, the displays getting bigger as the bezels get smaller has been part of the problem.
If you look at the Nexus 5X [1] you'll see that it has an enormous (by modern standards) top bezel. By comparison, a phone like the S22 has basically no bezel at all and will be much harder to use one-handed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_5X
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Smart phones are too useful and becoming too ingrained to life for the vast majority of people to not buy a phone off some sort.
I had the same situation with the S10e. I don't know how it compares to the Moto X4, but with the increased sized phones I have no interest in a new Android.
I only got this one because I couldn't find one smaller.
At the current rate I would have to move to iPhone just to stay a similar size.
> people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly
> until it breaks, becomes unusable
You say no, but then you give two cases in which you would be a person who needs a phone who would grudgingly buy something.
Among smartphone customers, what do you think the numbers are for customers who prefer a big phone vs a little phone?
99/1?
90/10?
80/20?
I don’t know this myself. But I figure that if no one is stepping into this market, it’s probably pretty damn small.
See post above re: manufacturers.
I think this is at least partially a feedback loop issue. There aren't manufacturers even making small screens, and the time/cost of doing that isn't seen as worth investing in... because... look at what's selling - larger screens! - which are the only thing we're selling because... look at what's selling!
A small niche player that wants to try a different form factor/size isn't practically able to enter the market with anything but commodity screens.
I'm not sure why you're asking me, but the OP's site says that 5% of iPhone orders (10 million phones a year) are the mini. That's quite a large market in absolute terms.
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> some people are more willing to compromise than me
s/some/most/
> and the component suppliers have also been looking at the trendlines so they are building bigger and bigger
but... aren't they influencing the trendlines by doing this? if the only things manufacturers make are bigger and bigger, they then get to use the sale of those bigger items as justification to continue to make bigger items?
Also seems a bit weird with more eco-awareness going on that some manufacturers wouldn't explore/embrace 'smaller' in some sense. At scale, it would mean less materials, less shipping, less warehouse space, etc. Apple made a huge stink about getting rid of a wall plug in their packaging, and... over hundreds of millions of units, that little bit doesn't hurt.
Wouldn't more 5" screens (vs 6"+) require less power, less weight/shipping, and less input materials?
Yes, it is absolutely in a feedback loop. It's kind of bizarre to see up close.
The consumer hardware duopoly of Apple and Samsung are the only ones who seem to actually drive manufacturing trends. There are also tons of devices being made for the Chinese market, but you can't buy those because they're usually locked up in supplier agreements and honestly they don't meet "flagship" specs for display quality.
Component suppliers, true we-make-parts manufacturers, are not really trying to influence the big picture so much as make sure they are running their manufacturing lines at capacity. And if they are building panels on spec for open market sales, they are going to build >6" displays because it's a higher probability they'll actually sell at volume.
"Yes, it is absolutely in a feedback loop. It's kind of bizarre to see up close."
So supply chains behave like ecosystems.
In the natural world we see insects and animals develop things like bright plumage and big horns because the animal before them was successful in doing the same thing. This behavior can go on for a long time too. Then an asteroid hits (tantamount to bad economic times) and the fast moving generalists seem to succeed better than the highly adapted specialist.
iPhone mini is 3% of sale. That's the trend.
Good point, with caveats: What is the comparison of 13-non pro vs. 13 mini? When I almost bought an iPhone recently, the thing that made me hesitate to consider for so long was that the mini is not pro - I want 90/120 hz, and they made a substandard flagship and blame poor sales on size. However, if the non-pro-fat 13 has great sales, you have a point.
Second, it's only iphone. I hesitated for so long to consider it at all because it requires switching environments.
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When did you see they promote mini? It's always the PRO since high margin is only there.
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I wonder if there isn't a third factor:
3. Android OEMs can't make a good small phone, even if there was the demand to produce it at scale
Because of how efficient Apple's SoCs are compared to Snapdragons, Android phones typically have much larger batteries than iPhones while getting about the same battery life. Big battery requires a big phone. The occasional somewhat small Android phone (for example Galaxy S10e) tends to have awful battery life.
Pixel 5 has great battery life. Note that none of the requirements are that it is some game machine or anything. Even less than top-tier chipsets are just fine for me. I just want a good camera in a pocketable form factor.
I think OP means that Android Phones with comparable battery life to an iOS device tend to have a larger battery to support that (when compared to the iPhone), which is more difficult with smaller enclosures (i.e. in a large phone it's easier to hide a large battery, and they don't scale entirely proportionally to screen size).
i.e. the Pixel 5 will last about 10% longer than an iPhone 12 on a single charge, but it achieves this with a battery that is about 45% bigger (2,800 mAh vs 4,080mAh). Both have the same size screen (in fact, the iPhone is slightly larger).
The Pixel 5 is closer in size to an iPhone 13 than a 13 Mini. IIRC it’s nearly the exact same size as an iPhone 11 Pro.
The camera is often the reason i end up with a phone that's way bigger than I'd otherwise like. The Pixel 6XL has the better camera but otherwise I'd have been all over the 6 (or smaller if it had they done anything in that space). My Pixel 4 still feels way better sized when i go back to it periodically.
You can make thick phone. Thick phones are much more pleasant to hold.
That's another thing I want from a phone that no OEM seems to want to make. Make the phone thicker, get rid of the camera bump, and fill the extra space with a bigger battery!
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My Unihertz Jelly2 is much smaller than TFA is asking for (and has a shitty camera plus midrange CPU making it disqualified), but battery life is Just Fine. Making the phone significantly larger should easily allow for a large enough battery for a flagship processor.
There are small phones with decent battery performance in Android too. Zenfone 8 from last year is an example. But new small phones is a dying breed going forward with big players not interested in making them at all anymore. Only less known brands dab in making them or some budget phones.
There used to be plenty of small Android phones. They could make them again. Battery life or processor power might be a bit less, but they used to work fine. There's no good reason why they can't again.
Not intending to start a storm here.
Why does the author want an Android? The iPhone mini would do the job right? I have a iPhone mini for the same reasons of size, premium feel and price.
It would be cool to hear what the founder of Pebble has to say about "why Android". Has he said it anywhere else?
Article:
> # Why don’t you just use an iPhone Mini?
> I actually do now! I switched from Android back to iPhone in late 2021 because the Pixel 6 was too ridiculously large. This was my first iPhone since the OG iPhone.
> But only 5% of all iPhones sold are Minis (roughly 10m phones per year). This means that Apple may decide to kill the Mini. For Apple, 10m phones is peanuts. But for an independent company 10m units per year would be spectacular.
> If Apple kills the Mini, those people will need a new home. An Android phone (with Beeper for iMessage) might be an adequate alternative.
[... snip ...]
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From the website:
>[...] personally, after 6 months of iOS I am itching to get back to Android. Why? The notification system SUCKS on iOS compared to Android. It’s impossible to move files between apps. Hard to get any work done on it. Beautiful hardware though!
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Remove all the crapware and you are generally back to a good battery life
S10e battery life was generally fine for me, always lasting at least one day of typical usage, even when I was on the go all day.
Talking about notch/hole-punch displays. As somebody who never ever uses front-facing camera, can I have a phone/display without such defects, please?
If you sum together the stuff people in this thread has suggested, you have the Homers Car of phones on your hands
...what stuff?
The suggestions I'm seeing are yes hole punch, no hole punch, a screen you can use with one hand, just enough battery-filled thickness to have no camera bump, good camera, microsd, fingerprint sensor, headphone jack.
And one person wants a keyboard but I don't think they're suggesting that for this phone.
Once you decide if you want a hole punch or not, I see no issue with implementing the rest of those features in the same phone in a reasonable way.
It's this or a Youtube clip that's maybe monetized by Disney at best... https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
The Homer was a car that Home Simpson built to exactly what they wanted without any tradeoffs for off the shelf components, trends, or sensibility of what currently was common.
It's also somewhat design by committee, with features like a more luxurious bubble for the adults, and a micro-bubble for the kids; presumably so you can ignore anything but the screams or silence.
I also suspect this fictional car might have been an ingredient in the market shifting from minivans to SUVs. Those don't have such great audio isolation but were even taller than the minivans (which were taller than station wagons). Or it could be the 'backup camera' finally reaching a tolerable price level.
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It's really just the iPhone 3GS.
Indeed. Those notches, hole-punches etc, I could do without. I very much prefer to have a bit of bezel and have a proper screen (preferably even with angular corners, rather than rounded corners). This also helps when handing the phone to somebody else to show them something... they have a place to hold the darn thing without accidentally swiping, tapping, or - worst of all - hitting the back button.
Apparently, Android now has an option to emulate a bezel, thus hiding the hole-punch camera.
No, because there are so few of people with your opinion that those types of phones will not sell enough to recoup costs, much less make a profit. At most, you can buy a phone with a pop-up camera (the OnePlus 7T Pro is nice, although a few years old now) [0].
[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/pop-up-camera-phones-slider...
The popup selfie cam on the 7pro is very, very good, because:
a) guaranteed not to be on until it's out
b) never eats screen space, ever
My current phone is a 7pro. I haven't seen a good replacement yet.
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It probably wouldn't work well for a small phone, by my oppo has a pop up camera which works much better than I'd expected.
Majority of the time I enjoy a full screen experience with a tiny bezel. If I need the selfie cam it silently and very quickly is there.
I think they didn't catch on as they are complicated and inhibit IP68 ratings.
But I think I'll struggle to move on from it. The notches and hole punch cameras just look like an irritating defect when I use them.
Yeah, no kidding. How much of the small phone demo overlaps with the selfie demo? I could go without a front camera.
"selfie"? Video-calls are especially normalized now, since the pandemic. My family and friends use video-calls more often than voice-only calls now.
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I love a small phone but I need the front cam for quick video calls.
Front camera, 3mm headset jack are must for me. If I could get a notification LED too... You might be able to get a lot of money out of me!
The hole punch is a nice to have. A phone with a case that was half the area of a pixel 6 pro, and also had a top bezel would still have a perfectly usable screen.
On my G7 Play with LineageOS, I was able to "disable" the notch -- that is, draw a black bar around it, and have a proper rectangular display with a full-width status bar right below it.
Works great, especially considering the display is not quite small enough for me in the first place.
You can do that with the stock Android too, once you've enabled the developer options in settings. The setting needed is "Display cutout" --> "Hide".
“and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly“
So true... And my anecdotal observation suggest another detail that makes small unattractive to brands: the way my social circles happen to be, I crossed path with plenty of owners of various incarnations of the Xperia Compact (r.i.p.). If my observations where representative, the Compacts would come close to outnumbering iPhones. They all wanted a small phone, somewhat waterproof and with a reasonably good camera. Almost all of them identifying strongly with some outdoor hobby like cycling or rock climbing, but wouldn't want a dedicated "outdoor" or "sports" phone. So far so good, looks like a pattern. But they have another thing in common: none of them would ever consider buying a high end phone (the Compacts were, or reasonably close) at or near release price.
Also I'm a little surprised you're hoping an online petition will work after your prior experience trying to influence your acquirers. I presume you saw the inside of Fitbit / Google and how decisions are made...
probably because eric has a history of pd from a customer frustration pov whereas your well articulated explanation mainly represents manufacturers' pov.
btw, such kind of math-checks-out logic is what keeps someone from developing the iphone in 2004. everything about mobile then made sense...to carriers and manufacturers.
I suspect that part of the problem is that, as measured by actual purchases, people don't really prioritize small size and displays that much.
Look at how long all of the requirement lists posted around these threads are. Some people really want a nice camera, some a headphone jack, some a SD card or big battery etc. I would expect that it's a fact of life in a small phone that you can't fit everything anyone might want, but everyone has a different list of must-haves, making it much harder to make one device that all of the small-phone-wanter market will actually buy.
And price. If you really want some one-off thing, you've gotta pay more for it. Would you pay $2k, $3k, more for a great small phone? Seems likely that such prices would help a lot at getting them made. But in reality, people seem to refuse to pay more than a modest markup over the mainstream model with tens of millions produced. Sorry folks, I don't think it works like that.
> Some people really want a nice camera, some a headphone jack, some a SD card or big battery etc
We used to have these things in small form factors. Those of us annoyed by where the big companies forced the direction of development are mostly very aware that things have regressed hard.
> But in reality, people seem to refuse to pay more than a modest markup over the mainstream model with tens of millions produced
Worse, they expect it to be cheaper since "it has less screen and battery it must be cheaper to make!"
All the comments about how it will be too expensive and difficult to source unusually sized parts make me wonder how they make something like the Hammerhead Karoo for $400 - an android device with a 3.2" sunlight readable reflective screen (supposedly even more expensive), custom software. etc. Is the market for a bike computer so much larger than that for a smaller phone? I don't think they're burning VC, it was crowdfunded IIRC.
You helped design the HTC EVO 3D!! I loved that phone what a great design.
Thanks for the kind words! I love the "helped" preface because it's exactly right, design is a team sport and I strongly believe in giving credit where due. Ben Chen (https://www.benchendesign.com/) was the creative lead on EVO 3D. I lead the technical side of the design for that one but he set the vision and the aesthetic. Great dude to work with too.
> You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch.
I think GP probably needs to be more flexible about their "must-have"'s. If you could get a nice phone with a small screen, would a small bezel on top for a camera be such a disaster?
I go to aliexpress, and I see a number of 4" screens. Some even come with capacitive touch sensors mounted on top.
Yes, they are low-resolution by today's standards, something like 800x480. Still, they are available for those who might be considering to produce a really compact phone. Instead, they go to high-end coffee machines and the like, and to RPi tinkerers.
My hunch that the limiting factor would mostly be the battery. Modern radios and modern CPUs and GPUs consume more, and you don't want to market a very slow phone, or a phone that has 6 hours of daily usage worth of battery. And you can't hide as much battery behind a small screen.
> You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch
How about getting one of those foldable screens in the larger standard size, and then just... tucking away the excess inside the phone body?
Y'know, like the marketing material for the iPhone X claimed it was doing: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0fd6daf2b9b742bf5dbf10... (though it actually wasn't.)
> Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring, and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly. I've been in the meetings, small phone advocacy goes nowhere.
I love my iPhone 12 mini and prefer the form factor, but will go bigger, because of battery life.
The iPhone 13 Mini improved battery life significantly. The A15 series is significantly more efficient and they managed to increase the battery capacity. It should last somewhere in the range of 30% longer than the 12 Mini.