Comment by pseudalopex
4 hours ago
> Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
Large and small companies sell smaller Android phones.
It's very difficult to find something around 140 grams and 140x80 even giving them some slack about the thickness. The Samsung S25 [1] is about there but I currently still use an A40 [2] because of the size and weight. I'd give away a couple of cm of height. A zero bezel 120mm phone would be ok. 120 grams are a dream.
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s25-13610.php
[2] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a40-9642.php
Your weight requirements are more restrictive than your size requirements. GSMArena's phone finder found foldable or rugged phones which satisfied size but not weight. And Unihertz phones appear well known where small phones are discussed but are not in GSMArena's database for some reason. The Unihertz Jelly Star satisfied your requirements. But the screen is smaller than the 1st iPhone's even.
The problem is Apple's monopoly on devices that run iOS. In an alternate reality, Apple licensed out iOS, and alternative designs could flourish. The Android ecosystem still has keyboard phones a la Blackberry. Caterpillar makes an Android phone with a FLIR camera. It's a gimmick, unless you work somewhere where it's not.
In this alternate history, there's a tiny design firm out of Carmel, south of Cupertino, doing bespoke runs of an iPhone 4 with A18s and eSIM capability and they're always sold out.
That happened with the Mac in the mid 90s and Apple closed the deals immediately when the clones started to sell well, because they were better machines than the ones Apple sold. If Apple didn't stop the clones they would be a software company by now and we'd probably have a PC market with 90% of Mac compatible machines and 10% of Windows PCs + Linux.
The first link I googled about it is https://tedium.co/2025/09/02/apple-macintosh-clones-history/
> In this alternate history
In this alternate history, who would have invested the billions of dollars in developing the processor line all the way up through the A18 if it's not available as a market differentiator?
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