Third model from the left is funny, almost no screen at all. :)
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!
This graphic is missing the (de)evolution in phones when manufacturers unnecessarily started putting holes and notches in the screens.
#StopPuttingCutoutsInMyFuckingDisplays #BringBackBezels
Some phones go to the extreme, but my small circle camera cutout doesn’t bother me. On a phone, it’s always in the status/notification bar anyways so not a big deal unless you watch a lot of widescreen content.
The biggest deevolution must be audio jacks… the big lie of “we need to remove them so we can make your phones smaller”, just for phones to get thicker. Surely it can fit.
i would kill for button based menu navigation to come back
Why
They prolly like murder or sth
ergonomic, don’t have to move your hands.
tactile, don’t have to watch the phone to navigate if you are familiar with what you are doing
“safer” since you can rest your hands while holding your device without worrying about accidental touch inputs that means you can have a firmer grip
But it eats into tbr screen size if implemented the old school Blackberry way, instead what I’d prefer is a under the screen slide out keyboard + navigation pad, like the Blackberry priv, or even the LG wing with the second display screen could have been an amazing form factor, allowing you to control the main display from the smaller customizable touch display at the bottom, at least my main screen wouldn’t have all these finger smudges
Yes, but even just for menu navigation without keyboard would be an improvement. wouldn’t have to use more space than the old physical home buttons.
However typing is the more frustrating element, so it would be nice.
ergonomic, don’t have to move your hands.
I can’t even begin to understand what you mean by this. It sounds like maybe you’re an iPhone user, which has almost no native universal controls. Android has options like gestures or a digital button bar, which allow for universal navigation from the same location that physical buttons would be in.
tactile, don’t have to watch the phone to navigate if you are familiar with what you are doing
Those buttons are contextually dynamic. You wouldn’t be able to use them without looking at the screen anyway.
“safer” since you can rest your hands while holding your device without worrying about accidental touch inputs that means you can have a firmer grip
How are you firmly gripping buttons without pushing them? This makes no sense.
It sounds like you have rose tinted glasses inspired by the inferiority of iOS, but I’m making assumptions.
Tallest on the left, shortest on the right…SIZE!
2015
And then all innovation ended
You can’t really improve much on the current phone. The screen is almost 100% of the phone’s surface. There are no moving parts. What else could You improve?
Look at the design of Blackberry Priv, or the LG Wing, they could keep the big screen and still figure out more innovative layouts, if they wanted to and if there was enough customer demand
i don’t think maximizing screen surface area percentage is that great, actually. i’d much rather have my physical navigation buttons back. also that “notch” thing that so many new phones are doing is stupid af.
I have a big screen because I have big thumbs and soft keyboards suck. I still have epic typos though.
Lots of “stuff” in my homework folder.
That Motorola RAZR in the middle, god that was an awesome phone. So sleek. Satisfying to close!
Would love a slightly thicker phone with a huge removable battery
Do you feel like magsafe batteries scratch that itch?
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.
also we have to encase our phones in cases because they’re not durable enough to survive day to day life. they could be made more rugged from the factory
What are you all doing with your phones that you need to put them in cases? I feel like this is the equivalent of covering a high-end car in bumper stickers.
dropping them accidentally occasionally.
are you still alive, Nazi?
Ehhh the one phone I didn’t put a case on happened to be the one phone I broke a screen on. Maybe it’s just pure chance, but I started doing cases and screen protectors again after that
You’ve never damaged a phone ? You would be in the minority I think.
That’s mostly because we care about aesthetics. My work phone is some Samsung flagship model from two years ago, I don’t have a case for it (because I don’t give a shit his it looks). Its with me on all factory visits in dirty production environments and what not, dropped it multiple times, stored in my pocket or just thrown in my bag. Screen is not cracked, sides and back are scratched and dinged up, but nothing is broken. They’re plenty durable if you don’t care about minor cosmetic things.
oh man your experience is so different from mine 😂
any phone i drop brings it a little closer to being completely non functional as long as it’s not in a case.
but i do agree with you about one thing: it is all about aesthetic. there’s tons of phones out there made with less shatterproof/scratch resistant glass, or think enough outer shells to protect their innards because when you buy a phone in a store you find the slim ones sexier
They’re experience is different than pretty much every single person on the planet. Hell I keep my phone in a case covered and I still crack the screen even with screen protectors on it.
How do you guys crack screens so easily? I’ve had it happen on one phone and I’ve dropped all of them, sometimes without a case, mostly without a screen protector.
The one that did crack was from like the tiniest drop after 2 years of use but it was a cheap phone without gorilla glass IIRC
I have an 1800$ phone, and have cracked it by just using it.
Is it like a foldable or something? Otherwise I don’t get why a 1800$ phone should be so much more fragile than an iPhone a bit more than half that price. Or any of the <1000$ Androids I’ve owned before I switched over.
Nah, I’d prefer to have a case I can swap once it becomes too damaged vs a phone chassis whose damage I have to live with until I buy a new phone. I’m trying to keep my phone for a long time, so the former is definitely better for my use case.
there’s no preventing us from having thinner cases and thicker phones for such scenarios (and is probably the route i’d want to take, too, since i’m extra clumsy)
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This is a good idea. I’ve had to learn how to disassemble and fix phones for the wife mostly and me leastly. She broke a camera glass - and a glass coated back plate. My issues were battery replacement and a USB port replacement and one headphone jack replacement. All things I managed to learn how to fix to keep our 5 to 7 year old phones going until we were damned ready to get a new one. Durability is crap for a reason.
are you still alive, Nazi?
I think most phones are plenty durable, people are just paranoid.
And repairs are too expensive/risky. I think more repairable phones is a better aim than more rugged ones.
oh! so we’re clear i’m not advocating against repairability. we absolutely must have that. but i’m tired of how easy it is to destroy an unfixable phone. we should have repairable phones that are designed to have long service intervals
are you still alive, Nazi?
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 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.
I use mine as my daily driver. It’s cute and sufficient. I still have a large smartphone at home for some things, but the Star is what I take into the world.
God, I miss that show. I’m gonna go pirate that shit.
You can watch it on the Internet archive
Thank you so much!
Look at all that screen real estate. Utterly wasted on ads and super tall fonts.
“Owning your hardware” implies the bootloader is unlockable and relockable.
Don’t forget all the margins around everything for no reason
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)
Super tall fonts?
Yes, look at the screen resolution of your phone (mine is at 1080x2340 by 6.38 to 2.97 inches) and then at an old palm PDA from the early 2000s with 320x320 (or at tops 320x480 by 4.8 to 3.1 inches) and now compare what amount of text you can display on each. The Phone should be able to display soo much more Text, but it doesn’t because the Fonts are so tall.
Thats what I mean.
Porn, this meme used to say porn! Why do we keep self censoring?
It used to be porn but that was back when phone screens were 16:9. Now they are 18:9 and thats for vertical scrolling of social media feeds.
Because reposters don’t care, they just repost as is, they don’t restore, decensor or remaster anything… And there’s no incentive to, people will upvote anything, there’s no minimum quality anymore (if there ever was at all).
While porn is definitely part of it, you can also watch Futurama on your phone.
That’s essentially porn for your soul
I agree with the sentiment, but porn is maybe too restrictive. Phones basically became the new TV.
Good point, overall short form video apps must trounce porn sites
Do tankies hate porn?
I have never met anyone that didn’t like porn. Even your most prudish Christians like porn. Why do you think they fight so hard to ban it, they like it and are ashamed for liking it.
The social media algorithms that give us fake internet points have conditioned us to comply.
We’re on Lemmy though. Even if it were censored you could simply post it to an instance that won’t censor.
That’s why the original commentor was complaining about it. And I’m agreeing with them.
They got bigger so there was more room for ads.
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.
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.
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 😑
