Look at all that screen real estate. Utterly wasted on ads and super tall fonts.
Well, I like reading comfortably
Same, so for that reason the ads should gtfo to make more space for the text 👍
(And fonts that are tall but not wide aren’t very comfortable imo)
Same, it hurts my eyes if the text is too small. I have all my fonts set to 120% size minimum.
“Owning your hardware” implies the bootloader is unlockable and relockable.
Don’t forget all the margins around everything for no reason
Would love a slightly thicker phone with a huge removable battery
This looks too good to be true, especially from aliexpress
A friend got one. A few months in it works flawlessly. It even has a projector built in!
It really is a tank.
It’s Chinese. Will it spy on you? Maybe, but so does Google, maybe the govt, the meta app has been proven to listen even when supposedly not active.
Maybe the least invasive option is Pixel with graphene.
I use a Xiaomi, fwiw.
Sadly that would cost me 1000 USD and I cant afford that haha
You might like the king kong mini 2
I do like that phone, but it’s 5 years old now. Do they even make it any longer?
There’s a pro version and the king kong mini 3 too, both more recent.
There’s a mini 3 but it’s taller so not as small
Do you feel like magsafe batteries scratch that itch?
Nah, specially after a couple of years and the phone’s internal battery doesnt last a full day
I have small hands and I hate how few small phones there are now
I have larger than small hands and hate how few “small” phones there are.
I have hands and hate how few “small” phones there are.
iPhone 13 mini user here; I can relate. Anything bigger than this is too big for me. I will use it until it breaks or security updates stop. After that I will have to see.
Older, smaller phones with PostmarketOS come to mind. But this OS is not ready for day-to-day-use, just yet.
My latest was a zenfone 10, which was the smallest I could find that had good features. It was not easy to find anything though 😑
Same. It’s been a problems for way over 10 years now. I’ve upgraded to the pixel 9 pro and it’s just too big, even though it’s one of the smaller modern phones available. It’s actually smaller than my previous phone but it seems harder to hold one handed.
By stuff you mean animated GIFs of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions being violated by giant alien tentacles, right?
Just say porn
That’s so obvious I didn’t think it needed to be said. Who doesn’t watch animated GIFs of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions being violated by giant alien tentacles?
Maybe if you’re a kinky pervert you’d watch .mpeg of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions and giant alien tentacles doing missionary in a committed exclusive relationship exclusively for having kids, but nobody is that depraved.
The weight scale is misrepresented, though.
Now I’m mad
Good catch!
There’s an early Corner Gas episode where Brent and Davis get into a competition over who can get the smallest phone, it feels so odd watching it today.
i had a guy visit the office a couple months ago with a smarty phone that was smaller than my flip phone closed-up. i loved it. i decided then that if i ever did ‘have to’ get one–and i could afford it, it would be one of those (a jelly).
Unihertz Jelly Star! I bought one solely to use as an mp3 player, but I got very close to it becoming my regular full-time phone.
God, I miss that show. I’m gonna go pirate that shit.
You can watch it on the Internet archive
Thank you so much!
They got bigger so there was more room for ads.
That Motorola RAZR in the middle, god that was an awesome phone. So sleek. Satisfying to close!
lol that was dope. When ads on TV used to be longer than 15–30 seconds, eh.
Lots of “stuff” in my homework folder.
From this graph we can say the Razr was peak
I still have one somewhere. I’m amazed at how quickly people forgot that for a period of about a year, the Razr was the “it” phone to have. It was a fashion symbol, and had the same general societal status as the iPhone… before the iPhone.
Then smartphones hit it big especially with the iPhone itself and nobody gave a shit anymore.
One of the Razr’s other big contributions was in abandoning the usual stupid proprietary multi-pin model specific cell phone charging connectors because it normalized the then state of the art USB mini B connector for both charging and data transfer. People were going around calling the mini B “the Razr plug” for a couple of months there, fully believing it was yet more proprietary bullshit because that’s what they’d been conditioned to expect.
Early cell phones were weird. We don’t get that kind of weird anymore.
For me the Palm Pixi was the peak expierence: small, touch friendly, hardware keyboard, relatively open OS, integrated headphone jack, wireless charging and very good battery live.
we
could watch stuffcould watch adsAnd porn
I really want to know now if people somehow still managed to get porn on their old Motorolas. Must’ve taken ages to download but probably worth it. Maybe.
I remember back in 1990ish, there was a guy involved in the local music scene who got interviewed on AM radio (Right before the rise of conservative talk radio, when there were still local hosts talking about local issues.). This guy wasn’t a big shot and not a musician, just a guy passabout music. tmusic. He went by the moniker Jim Clevo, I had the fortune of meeting him once. Anyways, he had insight as to where the music industry was headed. In the interview, he told how in the future we would be listening to music through our phones. At the time high tech was a cordless landlines with an answering machine built in. He sounded crazy, i couldn’t figure out why he thought we would all be holding phones up to our ears listening to music, I never had anything but a corded phone at the time. Not sure why I’m rambling about it other than this post reminded me of him.
Was he frank zappa?
https://www.grunge.com/139089/rock-stars-who-freakishly-predicted-the-future/
I mean as soon as cassettes were a thing, mix tapes by holding the cassette to the radio became a thing right? Why not phones?
Hell back in the 80s, before the breakup of Yugoslavia, they went a step further: they had a home PC that could be built from parts available at electronics stores. It used a cassette recorder for a HDD.
A local radio station started broadcasting software, pc owners could record the audio of a program on a Walkman, then put the tape in their PC.
There’s a past we never got where a radio-based internet existed alongside the landlines based one.
And what if I don’t want to watch “stuff” on my phone? My phone is supposed to be a portable “swiss-army-knife” of digital tools.
They made tablets for the other “stuff”
I think most of the population are on tiktok and that crack, need big screen for maximum experience…
I think a lot of the reason phones are getting bigger is because of battery life. You can absolutely make a small phone with a big battery, but then it would be thicc and people (read plebs) don’t want little bricks, they want big slabs.
So for the few of us that want little bricks, we’re just entirely fucked. There are the Jelly phones, but they run Android, and I’d rather have a slab that spies on me a little less than a perfect brick filled to the brim with Google spyware.
I’m waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping that Linux phones get to the point where I can daily drive one.
I am in this camp- little brick with a replaceable battery because if I want to watch a show or play a game I’ll use a different device. Absolutely no one caters to us. I would also pick a Linux phone if I could in that form factor but in the US there’s not even a smattering of choice. To make a Linux phone work you’d need an emulation layer to make android apps work (I honestly don’t know the state of Linux phones on this ) but without it you’d be using a windows phone with craptastic app support. That’s what really killed WIndows phone. Lets keep hoping brother.
This is the only manufacturer I know of making modern little phones:
But they’re Android.
Those are actually really cool thanks!
We didn’t “realise” we could watch stuff; we got touch screen technology, wifi and mobile data became cheaper as we got 3G, 4G and 5G. The we *could *watch stuff, and browse the internet - this was always the obvious course of phones even in the 90s when bricks were still around. Meanwhile battery tech hasn’t moved forwards much, so these big screen, wifi, Bluetooth & 5G connected,video playing devices need bigger batteries to keep going all day. Ironically a bigger device - even with a bigger screen - will have a longer battery life because you can physically fit a bigger battery in.
Also this chart stops at 2015 - and thats still accurate. Mobile phone tech has plateaued. Time was, iPhone launches each year were a big deal because Apple was good at bringing previously out a of reach tech into the mass market. Now all the changes are minor and phone launches are dull. iPhones are now just popular because they’re iPhones. Chips are getting a bit more energy efficient pushing the capabilities a bit; but cameras, screens, storage and connectivity are probably as good as they’re going to get for now beyone incremental changes.
We’re now probably in the enshittification phase where companies try to justify ever increasing prices but can’t - iPhone prices have been largely static for 5 years because Apple can’t find a compelling reason to increase them. Whether there are stupid notches in the phone display, or expensive accessories like wireless headphones or now trying to up-sell people on software / services - ultimately a phone is just a phone now. The manufacturers latest hope is that somehow AI will allow them to charge more but it’s looking like AI in it’s current form has little value to consumers. Apple has delayed it’s changes to Siri because it’s struggling to make something that isn’t basically just another unreliable overhyped LLM.
Realistically the next real leap in phones will probably only come if and when battery tech improves; if smaller high energy density batteries come then that really will unlock a new revolution. The AI bubble doesn’t look like it’s going to deliver.
Before full touch screens came out I bought a small windows CE full screen device and put a few videos on it on a card (can’t recall if it was sd or something more primitive) and watched anime in between calls at work.
I always wanted this, and phones getting better at it just meant less devices. I am partial to phablets and fold phones because I like to read books,light novels,and manga on a bigger screen while being portable. I have in the past used both a tablet and phone before I got my fold, and when the inside screen of my fold failed after a couple years I am now back at both until I can afford a replacement.
I know not everyone wants this, but that’s why we have options, and dumb/feature phones can still be purchased, even from large carriers (though price of plan may be wasted on those). These memes act like there are only smartphones now, but dumbphones were always an option.
Realistically the next real leap in phones will probably only come if and when battery tech improves
I don’t think so. The real thing is just ergonomics. They want as big a screen as they can and human hands are only so big. They won’t retreat in form factor.
If anything they’ll are toying w bit with folding screens to make devices scale up and still be hand friendly.
The next big step is going to have to be wearable, to produce arbitrarily large content hands free. Don’t know if social norms will tolerate it, but that’s really the possible evolution from the status quo.
