Comment by bscphil
4 years ago
Thank you for working on this! I want to be honest, though, and say I think you're missing what the majority of users on this forum want in a small phone.
> Sub 6" display, matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini
No, bad. What most of us want are the particular set of trade-offs made by phones around 2015. Design wise, that means that you've got to have another hole in the bezel, because there's going to be an earphone jack. That's apparently anathema for modern phones, but probably 90+% of us want it. Again, that's Hacker News specific. I haven't polled the market in general. I just know that I (and many others) won't consider buying your phone unless it has a jack.
Likewise, I have not much interest in a phone with a hole punched in the screen (?!) for a camera or an ugly "notch". I realize this is more controversial, but I don't know the last time I even used a front camera. I think it's more in keeping with the ideal 2015 design to make the bezel just large enough to contain a camera, speakers, light sensor, flash/LED, etc. I would reluctantly buy a phone with a camera hole if it was otherwise acceptable and there was no ideal option on the market.
I'd prefer if the back were completely flat as well, with no camera bump. That's totally just my aesthetic preference though, I don't know how others feel. I think it should be possible to achieve this if we're going back to not worshiping thinness, and making the small phone thicker for the sake of battery life.
I'd also prefer a 16x9 display to whatever Apple is doing now. So much web video is still 16x9.
> Design wise, that means that you've got to have another hole in the bezel, because there's going to be an earphone jack. That's apparently anathema for modern phones, but probably 90+% of us want it. Again, that's Hacker News specific. I haven't polled the market in general. I just know that I (and many others) won't consider buying your phone unless it has a jack.
Your jump from "I want" to "90+% of us want" is an egregious failure in reasoning. You say that you haven't polled the greater market, but you also haven't even polled HN.
That's fair. On the other hand, if there's a single issue with modern phones that gets HN users raging more than their size, it's the lack of a headphone jack. I don't think I've seen a single issue that's been more complained about. The dominant narrative on HN seems to be that even if one doesn't use headphones personally, the removal of the jack served no purpose other than to pad the pockets of Apple. (Someone even managed to modify their iPhone to add an internal jack without breaking it, so it was definitely possible for Apple to do so without compromises.)
This is a bias in what you notice, not what people care about. Some people care strongly about headphone jacks, but until you have data indicating that some==most, you shouldn't let that feeling turn into a population-based argument.
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No bad. I don't want those iritating headphone wires. Also a phone that doesn't mind being dropped in water, so no headphone jack please. Notch is not really an issue, front facing camera is useful for video-calls. And i don't have a camera bump, that's solved by the case. Also, no idea what i'd do with memory cards, there's plenty memory in the my phone.
The iphone 13 mini works well for me. No idea if this represents anybody elso on HN...
> Also a phone that doesn't mind being dropped in water, so no headphone jack please.
People have somehow managed to forget this, but phones have been waterproof since ... basically forever without forgoing a headphone jack. I could link probably half the phones made between 2012-2017, but this phone is actually linked by the site itself: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/16/9549247/sony-xperia-z5-r...
Honestly, I'm not sure what the issue is supposed to be here. I've literally never, in 12 years of owning a smartphone, dropped it in water. I have no clue how that's even supposed to happen short of it falling into a river.
Since this is a small phone, I suspect most people will probably not be using a case that adds significantly to the size. Just a guess on my part though. I can live with a camera bump if I have to, I just think a lot of us miss the candy bar designs of ~2014-2015.
Some might want to do it on purpose… like recording videos in a pool or lake. I’ve done it with a 6S, it survived just fine.
The most common way that a phone gets into water is that a woman has the phone in her pocket and it falls into the toilet. Most women's clothing has extremely terrible pockets that cannot securely hold a modern-size smartphone.
I've never dropped a phone in water either, but what I did do was ride a motorbike in heavy rain with the smartphone as GPS and no case around it.
I am typing this from a waterproof phone with a USB C port and headphone jack. Yes, I have put it underwater. There were plenty of waterproof phones with headphone jacks before flagships dropped the port.