zlacker

>>erohea+(OP)
A problem is that even within the niche of small phones, not everybody has the same wishes.

Compared to your ideal specifications, my wishes are: support for microSD card storage; battery that easily and reliably lasts a full day with moderate phone usage; fingerprint sensor, not necessarily on the power button; camera decent, not necessarily great (I don't care that much about low light performance, for example).

I'm tempted to sign up even with the specifications as you list them though. Missing microSD card support could be the major dealbreaker. Or alternatively some other user-friendly reliable method of getting lots of files from my PC to the phone's storage, but so far I haven't found any. Early Android versions supporter USB mass storage and that worked pretty well, but the transfer method implemented on newer versions is very slow and never works reliably for me.

>>roelsc+db
> Missing microSD card support could be the major dealbreaker

And for the other guy a 3.5mm jack and for a third a physical off switch and look at that we have too many dealbreaker features for the form factor.

Power users tend to have more dealbreakers than the average consumer. Anecdotally, it seems power users prefer smaller phones. This might be what kills the small phone factor.

>>JumpCr+Ve
I believe the bit about power users is the HN effect at work, the main customers for small phones are people with small hands and/or pockets, who are disproportionally women.

Women are also overrepresented in the Really Big Phone market, and wield them two-handed.

They also trend heavily iPhone in the US market, but that leaves plenty of alpha for the manufacturer who serves the actual market for small-form-factor Android phones.

>>samatm+ph
As a non-power-user, I mostly keep my phone in the pocket, where I’d like it to be small.

I’d almost go for a dumb phone, almost... but then I need emails, maps and WhatsApp.

I don’t need 50 filters, 3 cameras, razor-thin (yet somehow enormous) body, more Storage than my laptop, etc etc...

>>rich_s+Mt
Yeah, I really wanted to ditch owning a phone at all when my last one broke but I realised that too many services require having some sort of authenticator or phone for two factor authentication. Banks literally require having a mobile phone as they will require you to authenticate transactions through their app. So I'm still chained to the damn thing.