Manufacturers don’t make displays under 6 inches available for purchase, with special cases (such as the iPhone Mini) being made under exclusive contracts. The best lead they have so far is to try to use displays designed for the front part of a foldable phone, but they’re yet to strike an agreement.
TIL that display manufacturers are also part of the reason why we aren’t getting small phones and why it’s probably even harder for manufacturers like Fairphone to make them.
My favourite phone ever was my first android phone in 2010, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini (e10i). Every time I’ve had to buy a phone since, I’ve looked around trying to find something similar, but it feels like no such thing will ever exist.
I still have one in a drawer! It’s functional, but too old to use…
It was the perfect phone.
Anyone who wants to keep this convo going, check out !compactphones@lemmy.world
On the other end there doesn’t seem to be any phablets either. they are all weirdly long screens.
They’re all phablets. People used to make fun of my Note 4 endlessly but it’s practically tiny by modern standards.
I had an og Dell Streak when it first came out. It absolutely blew people’s minds when they saw it back then.
Looked up some old reviews of it and can’t beleive it was a 5" screen. In my mind, I remember it being so much bigger.
and one of the driving forces behind the design of the Palm Pilot was that it had to fit in a shirt pocket …
i want a smartphone, that i can hold securely
while still being able to reach the entire screen.i have pretty big hands, and even i cant reach the upper left quarter of my phone (pixel6a) without letting go of the left and bottom edges.
its ridiculousPutting things like a back arrow on the upper left is just asshole design, for starters.
Similarly putting stuff in the upper right is just asshole design for those of us who are left handed, unfortunately that’s relatively common.
Most of the issues people have with Android are one and the same. Compared to a decade ago, there isn’t any choice any more
Years ago, there was almost too much variety at times, and manufacturers would experiment heavily alongside Google. Some phones had physical keyboards, some had no headphone jacks, some had no physical buttons at all, and they came in either stupidly small or (at the time) freakishly large.
Now, for some reason Android feels very sanitized, even the shite that manufacturers stick on top of stock to make it feel like it’s their product and not Google’s. There aren’t even that many manufacturers any more, and unlike the past when Android embraced being a bit different, it all feels like everyone is trying to follow Apple instead of Android leading the pack…
Very surprising that there’s no 5.5" phones on the market. I still have good eyes and I’d rather have more pocket space. Sticking with the pixel 7a for now, but yearning for a new Xperia X Compact.
It’s not really that complicated, people expect high end phones to have all day battery, which is hard to do with a small phone.
They could make a small screen phone, but thicker to make more room for a bigger battery.
If only high end smartphone chips focus more on efficiency rather than performance, which for most people is already powerful enough for day to day use.
It would stand to reason that a smaller screen would lend to less power draw both for the screen’s power usage and being able to use a lower resolution keeping the CPU draw lower too
