Yeah, roll one out with a 5.8" screen and a headphone jack amd I’ll buy it at a premium. I’d shell out even more for a true iPhone mini-sized phone if they make the battery fat enough for decent battery life – small phones can still be ergonomic and light enough with a little extra chonk.

Giant screen, no headphone jack? No thanks, I might as well buy a $50 android phone at a gas station.

10/10 review of purelymail as a 2 year user.

Cost me $20 so far. Because the service is just a service, not a massive ponzi scheme. We need more devs like the creator!

Plus the M7 had a nicer aluminum unibody. The M8 had plastic on the front. Still handsome, but not the same level of gorgeous macbook-style design the M7 had. Fuck, I’d rock an M7 today if they trimmed the glass bezel down, removed the hardware nav buttons, and tossed in some new hardware.

Consider giving Steven Erikson a try. Malazan Book of the Fallen is huge and time-consuming, but his style of writing is worth the effort in terms of story and character development. His Willful Child series is Sci-Fi and might provide a way of sampling his very unique style without diving into Fantasy.

Someday we’ll get that planned SGU conclusion. Someday…

Citymapper is the gold standard. Osmand is excellent, except for delays. Many countries have third party top-tier apps for transit and train navigation – Trainline comes to mind in the UK, but it varies by region.

The containers UI is damn near unusable, they’ve squeezed so many of those “offers” into the tiny addon manager popup.

I wish Mozilla had management who understood their userbase. But instead they keep pulling this crap which only makes me (and likely most other power users) less likely to use Mozilla branded products.

Saw someone open a PR with this fully implemented a couple of months ago.

Goddamned PM faffed about “UI research necessary before we make changes”, linked them to a bugzilla post closed in favor of a JIRA ticket only internal users could view…

And then closed the PR, denying the change. And we wonder why Mozilla has been struggling so much lately.

Yeah, the small car thing is a perfect parallel. The market doesn’t necessarily fit preferences perfectly: instead, companies optimise for whatever MOST folks will buy that nets them the most money.

They make more money selling a large phone with a bigger sticker price and a bigger profit margin, so they make big phones. And the most phone-hungry people, power users, who buy a new phone every year or so, tend to buy big phones. So they cater to that group.

Think of it this way: when I bought my iPhone SE 2016 7 years ago, I cast maybe $100 of profit “vote” in the marketplace.

Every time someone buys a $1700 folding phone, they cast something between $500 and $1000 of profit “vote” in the marketplace. And they do that every year, not once every 7.

Of course, I’d be willing to spend a lot more on a really decent small phone. But nobody in the market has really experimented with that model yet. And it is admittedly harder to fit components into a smaller phone body (though not as hard as Apple would have you believe – after all, the 14 and 15 literally takes up more space with a useless empty plastic SIM card spacer than the headphone jack used to take.

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I was going to say that the Mini should be pretty cheap now that it’s two generations old – the 13 is down to $629 new, after all, and the Mini ought to be $100 cheaper…

But it looks like Mini demand has actually driven prices much higher than the normal 13. Strange, almost as if there IS demand for small phones…

The Z fold is 67.1mm across in folded mode. The iPhone 12 & 13 Mini is 64.2mm.

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I’ve looked at the Unihertz phones quite a bit, but the cell bands and camera have stopped me so far. Your Lemmy instance implies that you’re in the EU, so you should give it a shot if you can stomach the crappy camera. I’m afraid no Unihertz phone has IMS or voLTE support in the USA, so it’s an open question if you’ll even be able to use them at all on our networks in a year or two :(

From the article:

“The problem is Apple has exclusive rights to [the iPhone Mini’s] display — so, even with the line being discontinued, [Samsung Display] isn’t going to give us access,” he told supporters last month.

Sounds like we’re splitting hairs: no other OEM is ordering the Mini-sized display, and this line certainly implies some kind of exclusivity. I’ve been following the thread on the Small Android Phone discord as well, and what I’ve seen there aligns with that understanding.

As far as I know, no small manufacturer ever gets displays built specifically for them. Even Pebble, which was a lot more popular than Small Android Phone, used preexisting displays. It just takes a lot of time, knowledge, and money to create a custom display.

I’m definitely a small phone lover. I don’t watch videos on my phone if I can avoid it and tend to consume text-heavy content.

Currently bouncing between an Xperia XZ1 Compact running Lineage 17.1 and an iPhone SE 2016 (!!!) running iOS 15. I get security updates for both, but it’s clear that I’ll have to move to a different phone in the next year or two.

Honestly at this point I just wish Apple would bring out an “iPhone Classic” based on the 4,5, or Mini body. Throw a headphone jack on there, a TouchID power button, and I’d pay serious money for it on launch day. I’d prefer an SD card slot, but if I know the phone will last for 3-5 years, I can pay a couple hundred extra bucks for 512GB of storage.

I just do not get folding phones. I understand that others like them, but I’ve never been a tablet guy. I suppose I would consider one with an internal e-ink screen, so I could combine my e-reader and phone into a single device… but I don’t think I’d enjoy using a phone that’s 1.5-2x the standard thickness of modern phones (not counting those massive camera bumps!). Plus the durability issue – I would absolutely not trust any modern folding phone to last 5+ years, and at the $1000+ price point, it damn well better last 5+ years.

Above all else, I prefer small phones for two reasons:

• my phone can “disappear” into my pocket, even if I’m walking, biking, running, or playing a sport
• I can use my phone with one hand on public transit, or doing one of the above activities if I decide to listen to music during that activity

It’s really frustrating that phone companies don’t bother with small phones any more. But nobody is even trying – and never has tried – to market a small phone that stays out of your way but helps you when you need it. Even Apple barely marketed the Mini at all (and debuted it during a global pandemic when a lot of people stopped commuting and traveling, two of the best times to have a small one-handable phone).

I wonder how much Apple fucked up the small phone market by maintaining exclusive access to the Mini screens from Samsung, as the author mentions in this article.

AOSP deserves to be split out from Google into some kind of open source nonprofit similar to Linux. It’s obvious that Google has no intent of maintaining AOSP in a usable form, they’ve become completely distracted by Pixel software features.

The quick settings tiles and settings app are perfect examples. No custom color picker for the UI either? I HAVE to use one of the “AI”-generated suggestions, or one of 6 incredibly boring barely-different pastel variations? These things technically work, but almost seem designed to piss off the end user.

It’s a tradeoff of convenience. I want the jack because it’s a universal standard that doesn’t require external batteries or the right alignment of the stars for proper functionality. Quality has been fine since the dawn of the smartphone, IMO, at least for earbuds. You’re still free to use a USB DAC if there’s a jack!