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There were benefits to the comically-large form factor, though. Touch keyboards worked significantly better with larger screens,
No, the tiny soft-keyboard on my old Galaxy Xcover is significantly easier to type than any modern phone. Less movement of the finger, easier targeting of the buttons. I'm always surprised anew, each time i dust it off and play with it.
Why can't we have both? I want a bigger phone. Bigger than what I have now, and many people would consider this to be a fairly large phone.
But I don't want to stop people who want smaller phones from having those, too.
Right? Everybody has different size hands, my hands are on the larger side and these bigger phones of today are actually pretty comfortable to me
Yes please. I really dislike iOS, but I use the iPhone 13 Mini for work and it's the perfect form factor. I desperately want an Android phone that's the same size, but I'm rocking a Flip which is the best I can do for small form factor right now.
The iPhone 13 mini was the perfect size and if Apple would have used that as a base for their new SE instead of the shitty 16e, I would have bought it in a heartbeat. Just give me a thicc 13 mini with a good battery, camera and a new processor.
When are we finally going to get curved phones on some kind of bracer? They wear them in every futuristic movie, we finally have curved screens, and no one’s made one for wearing on your forearm yet.
More than one company has gotten to the prototype stage. Don't remember any huge companies, but there's video out there. You don't realize how much the form factor sucks until it's real.
Maybe they could make a pop out version that would flatten when off the dock. Seems like it would be less wear and tear going from slightly curved to flat than the screens that fold completely.
Sounds like a big smart watch.
And I'm not sure how useful the Pip-Boy format would be. Now you've got a device that still requires both arms to use, but you can only use one hand...
People don't buy them for the price they'll buy bigger phones. That's it. That's the whole story.
They have to make the phone cost $300 less to sell in meaningful numbers. Why do that when they could just not make them at all and sell fewer models at higher prices?
Consumers just aren’t that interested in a product that’s visibly cheaper and worse than what everyone else is carrying. And that is what a smaller phone signals.
Phones are a status purchase; they all do basically the same things, but most people gravitate towards higher end phones because they offer all the fancy features. Flagship phones are all large, so that’s what you see in the marketing. Just like you’ll never see a car company put its cheapest base model on a car catalog cover.
A smaller phone tends to cut corners; it’s not just smaller, but also functionally worse. While the price might be appealing, the potential customer also knows that using said phone will mean a worse experience, and might even get them ridiculed because they got ‘the cheap one’.
So we can absolutely go back to small phones - we just don’t want to. Smaller, cheaper, worse products just don’t appeal to a status-conscious buyer. If phone manufacturers offered the same specs at different sizes, that might change. But any savvy tech buyer knows a smaller phone is worse than the bigger one.
Back in the pre-smartphone days, size was a thing companies could compete on since customers wanted small, light, distinctive designs in premium materials. Like the Motorola Razr V3. These days, that just doesn’t work.
Here's what I want, roughly in order of priority:
I currently have a Pixel 8:
A community-supported Linux phone would be awesome, since I'd get 1 and 3 by default and 2 by convention, but they don't meet my minimum needs from a phone: reliable basic feature support. Hopefully we get there by the time my Pixel dies.
