Because you don’t buy small ones.

Found my blackberry torch in a drawer a while ago. Man I love that thing, great size, solid pocket ability, great keyboard.

The history of large phones, from a technical standpoint:

• LTE required a lot more power than 2G/3G until efficiencies were improved, this required a larger battery to have comparable battery life, doubly so on the phones that ran two modems (mostly Verizon) one for 3G, one for 4G
• LTE required larger antennas as their low band frequencies were lower than previous cellular tech. (750MHz and later 600MHz vs 850MHz being the old lowest)
• Handset manufacturers then stopped making smaller product lines even after efficiencies improved
• People (“consumers”) realized they’d rather not buy a phone, tablet, watch, computer, anal implant, and preferred to just buy one device, settling on an oversized phone was enough between phone/tablet that they only needed to waste money on one device
• The market then went, “people prefer larger phones,” even though smaller phones were waning/outliers
• Tablets outside of Apple’s ostensibly died, although there are a few more choices these days that aren’t Apple
• Now phones have so many antennae
  • WiFi/BT (which are often shared)
  • WiFi 6 new band
  • NFC
  • Wireless charging coil
  • Ultra Wideband
  • 20 or 30 various cellular bands with 4x antennae for MIMO
  • mmWave (in America)
• Phones also have gigantic camera systems (although since Samsung gave up on 10x optical, they shrunk slightly on that platform)
• The cycle repeated itself a bit with 5G, the channels are so wide and huge, they can suck a lot of power when doing large data transfers, and also the addition of needing a separate amp/chip for 5G above sub6 as well as additional cooling
• “AI” stuff that requires more ML compute, and thus cooling and battery capacity, even though again, nobody wanted it
• All the metrics and analytics handset manufacturers constantly run on users, disabling all this alone would probably make your average phone last 3+ days

Since then, more and more people are trying to get flip phones, dumbphones, imported small phones, or giving up on phones entirely and switching to devices like the Lilygo T-Deck LoRaWAN device that has…dun dun dunnnnn…a literal BlackBerry keyboard, as people are sick of that fabled market deciding for them.

I’m… I’m using a flip phone

I loved small phones comeback in our society, but small phones has a little bit issue compared to normal sized phones nowadays like :

• Small battery capacity.
• Usually comes with shitty hardware.
• Small screen size means it’s only fit to used it for chat app (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc…).
• Lack of apps support since many apps nowadays ship for normal size phone, phablet, & tablet

I’ve switched fully to a 3" Unihertz Jelly Star in September. It took A LOT of customization to get it to become the “Intent” device that I had wanted it to be. But by now, it makes all unwanted behavior sufficiently difficult while allowing all modern conveniences such as IM, payments, tickets, navigation etc.

I’ll do a proper blogpost series about it some day.

If consuming content is how you want to spend your energy & lifetime, then the bigger & brighter & more-HDR-than-life the better. I hope you find happiness. But if you at some point tire of not-creating and cannot stand spending your time as a targeted money-sack, then tiny phones are a good way out.

I have no problems with broken applications on my Zenfone 8

I just want Sony to re-release the Xperia XZ1 Compact with updated internals.

I just want a dedicated headphone jack.

Because small phones suck. Every time my parents or my other older family members hand me their old tiny phone, I wonder how the heck they can even use them? Text entry, tapping on things, etc is so damned hard when everything’s so close together and my fingers are so fat.

Because most of us don’t want to.

for many it is their primary interface to the internet. I have simply come to accept that flagship phones are no longer made for me.

When my S10e finally needs to become landfill I’ll be looking at e-ink phones not the latest and greatest tablet parading as a phone.

I can definitely recommend the kingkong mini

I’m still using an iPhone mini and I haven’t experienced any bad layouts, broken websites, or any difficulty like that. It has the same resolution of the biggest iPhone I’ve ever had (iPhone X) so things are smaller, which would make it a poor fit for someone with poor vision, but for me it’s an absolutely perfect phone. It’s frustrating to know that the perfect phone for me could easily exist, and yet Apple will refuse to make it for me. I’ll be stuck with phones I don’t like for the rest of my life, it seems.

Motorola razr 2024 when closed is the perfect small phone. Almost all apps work on the small square screen.