zlacker

>>erohea+(OP)
Hi Eric, I'm a hardware startup guy myself (our paths have crossed) with the distinction that my own "very specific set of skills" has been honed at smartphone megacompanies and smartphone startups. OSOM, Essential, HTC, Samsung, Apple. I've designed and built a lot of phones. I'm building one now. I think this is a noble effort, I personally prefer pocketable phones too, but I think there are nigh-insurmountable hurdles in your paths forward.

- 1. Supply chain / component R&D -

You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch. If you end up doing this as your own startup then you're going to start by trying to buy off the shelf parts to keep costs down. But that display you want is simply not on any of the development roadmaps for the major component manufacturers. The industry has its own momentum, and the component suppliers have also been looking at the trendlines so they are building bigger and bigger.

If you can't find the screen you want in a catalogue then you have to pay someone to build it. Convincing BOE et. al that your phone will sell enough to pay off R&D costs is unlikely, so be prepared to pay several million bucks in NRE to make it worth their time (it might still not be) and the wait a year for them to spin up the fabs. So ~$5M and 9-18 months later you have a display.

- 2. Big players are uninterested, not uninformed -

Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring, and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly. I've been in the meetings, small phone advocacy goes nowhere.

Also I'm a little surprised you're hoping an online petition will work after your prior experience trying to influence your acquirers. I presume you saw the inside of Fitbit / Google and how decisions are made...

>>davee5+5r
Talking about notch/hole-punch displays. As somebody who never ever uses front-facing camera, can I have a phone/display without such defects, please?

>>nouser+Vy
Yeah, no kidding. How much of the small phone demo overlaps with the selfie demo? I could go without a front camera.

>>brnaft+jB
"selfie"? Video-calls are especially normalized now, since the pandemic. My family and friends use video-calls more often than voice-only calls now.

>>nfoz+RH
You do that on the phone? I'd never.

And nobody I know has changed their communication. Discord, text, call. Everyone in my milieu is painfully average.

>>brnaft+pQ
Nobody? I'm sort of in the same boat (I quite dislike video calls), but my extended family (from young to 60+) have started during pandemic and now continue to video call each other quite regularly - including group video calls.

As I said, not my preference and I rarely join, but for example my wife does video calls almost on a daily basis. So the "selfie" camera seems to be increasingly an important feature for the regular user.

>>jan_g+V11
I've seen it used once and to a disastrous result. I kinda feel like there are other workarounds too:

I remember one of the Motorola phones was designed for expansions, but that was pre-USB C. If you had a horizontally symmetrical phone, maybe widgets could solve the problem? Front facing and rear facing, while also being privacy respecting, no notch necessary, and similar resolution to boot. so maybe easier to source. Free up some room on the SOC and relieve some complexity while providing the added benefit of port protection. Presumably this could be applied to SD and obviously 3.5mm jacks.