This is equivalent to something I called the "QWERTY paradox" more than a decade ago:
Back when the Smartphone market exploded, people disliked typing on a touchscreen and repeatedly stated that they want a device with a physical keyboard.
There was plenty of evidence, surveys, market studies, trend predictions, devices for these "Messaging-centric" use-cases were always part of this market-demand roster.
But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.
Every major vendor went through this cycle of learning that lesson, usually with an iteration like "it needs to be a premium high-spec device" --> (didn't sell) --> "ah, it should be mass-market" --> (also didn't sell).
You can find this journey for every vendor. Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, Sony.
The same lessons were already learnt for small-screen devices: There was a "Mini" series of Samsung Galaxy, LG G-series, HTC One, Sony Xperia. It didn't sell, the numbers showed that it didn't attract additional customers, at best it only fragmented the existing customer-base.
Source: I work in that industry for a long time now
I hope that small companies would launch device like this with 500-1000 devices being created and sold in a year just fulfill the niche and doesn't go bankrupt
The real reason the iPhone mini failed is not related to screen size, it's because its segment was canibalized by the cheaper alternative, the SE. The 2020 and 2022 sold like hot breads, wherehas their screen was almost an inch smaller than the iPhone mini. This is the proof that there a significant market for people who don't care about size and would gladly take the smallest option at a $100 discount from the regular one.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/3/28/2909815/dell-retires-venu...
> 192.78 g
Kind of funny, I would've thought it was heavier, but that is less than an S25 Ultra in weight... I think that also speaks to how large screens have gotten!
Well, there was BlackBerry. Multiple phone vendors assuming they could refresh a previously world-dominating form factor with contemporary smartphone guts only seems unreasonable in hindsight.
I just want something small that will fit comfortably in my pocket, and I can use with one hand.
Say you charge $1,000 per device. That means you need to build an entire company, pay staff, and prototype then manufacture a custom hardware device with customized software with less than a million dollars. Costs add up real fast.
I did this for years because I liked the form factor so much.
My new buying criteria for my iPhone is simply “buy the smallest one offered”.
But I’m willing to accept I’m not a big enough market segment to move the market.
So, it did sell, but at the expense of larger phones. Which means we are not offered this because it's a bit more profitable for the smartphone makers to only offer larger phones. Extremely annoying.
The bakers says: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’
So the bunny leaves, but returns the next day. He once again asks if the baker has any carrot cake.
Once more the baker answers: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’
Once the bunny left, the baker started making a carrot cake thinking the bunny would return the next day for the cake. And so the bunny did, and he asks: ‘Do you have carrot cake?’
To which the bakers answers: ‘Yes, today I DO sell carrot cake.’
So the Bunny says: ‘YUCK, isn't it disgusting, why do people sell these things?!’
Can a similar device without malware not be made in small batches? At a selling price of $500 or less?
Correct. To back this up a little bit with numbers, the iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold about the half of the rate of the entire Google Pixel lineup. I bet lots of phone manufacturers would love to have half the sales of Google's premier Android phone. I also switched from Android to iPhone solely because of the 13 Mini form factor (I prefer Android, but I prefer a human-hand-sized phone even more).
Source:
Google shipped about 10 million Pixel phones in a year https://9to5google.com/2024/02/22/pixel-2023/
iPhone Mini accounted for about 3% of iPhone sales https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/21/cirp-iphone-13-best-selling-l...
iPhones sell about 200 million units per year https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/
200 million * 0.03 = 6 million iPhone Minis per year
My theory is that much of this effect is an error, or at least a far-less-than-ideal effort, on the part of the designers. Of course it’s hard to sell a low-end “mini” device with a worse camera, worse battery life, etc. But that’s not actually what I, or many people I discuss this with, want. I would happily buy a premium device that is short and narrow, and possibly even thicker as a tradeoff. There’s plenty of unexplored room in the design space here. For example: start with an iPhone Pro or whatever the Android equivalent du jour is. Keep the camera unchanged. Shrink the display but keep the same quality (at least equal pixel density). Now puff out the back so that the camera lenses are flat or even slightly recessed. Use the resulting added volume to compensate for the decrease in volume due to decreasing the other dimensions. Market the think as a Whatever Phone Pro Compact, and advertise clearly that the battery life is every bit as good as the non-Compact model version. Show off cool pictures models sticking this thing in their cool jeans pockets without them sticking out. Charge the same price as the ordinary Pro model.
As far as I know, no one has tried anything like this in recent memory. The iPhone 12 and 13 Mini were always marketed as the cheaper versions, and the cute little old SE model was very much a low-end version. Last I checked, there was no 5G Android device with similar dimensions from any manufacturer.
The mini could have been simply, iPhone. The marketing would have been that they managed to add an extra .7" of screen, while reducing the overall size and weight. That's a great pitch. Who doesn't want a bigger screen in something that more easily fits in their pocket? Instead they called in a "mini", people thought it would be tiny and hard to use, so they didn't buy it.
The iPhone 12 mini screen was only .1" smaller than the screen on the iPhone 8 Plus... the giant option from just a few years earlier.
The mini was a marketing and brand strategy failure, plain and simple. It wasn't a small phone.
This kind of over-generalization is always annoying me deeply.
Of course there IS a market for such a product, because at the very least I exist (as well as a good fraction of the 320 other people from HN who upvoted this submission so far).
The problem is that this market is tiny, and even a smaller share of this market is willing to make massive concessions on other aspects of the phone to have a smaller phone, so you end up with a much harder design space (because size is a big engineering constraint) for a minority market, and the endeavor is often not profitable enough for that reason.
It doesn't mean there's no market, it just means addressing this particular market is a tough business, these two statements aren't equivalent.
Show me the tiny Android flagship from the past 5 years that didn't sell well. (You can't, because there wasn't one.)
According to this article
> The ASUS Zenfone 10 is a compact flagship Android phone from ASUS. Sporting a little 5.9-inch display
Though you have to argue it's not tiny. (Don't think it sold all that well, though, at least not mainstream.)
AFAIK, these are similar to the iPhone SE? The SE form factor was great in terms of size and thickness. Easy to use with one hand. I miss that.
No, they were not. They were literally a scaled down version of their respective regular sized counterparts, the 13 Mini had the same cameras, SOC, memory, screen quality and storage options as the regular 13 [0], yet its sales success (or lack thereof [1]) was enough to instantly cure me of any previously held notions that there is a sufficiently large group of buyers for these devices out there.
It isn't because the specs are inferior, the cameras are changed, the display has a lower pixel density (the Mini actually had slightly higher ppi) or anything else. There simply is no sufficient market, the 13 Mini was the worst selling phone in that generation by a frankly impressive margin. 38% for iPhone 13 vs 3% for iPhone 13 mini, despite them being as close to just being scaled down and otherwise identical as one can make a phone speaks a very clear language that any manufacturer wanting to succeed has hear loud and clear. Most certainly why Asus has seized with their more compact smartphones. The amount of people I know that praised Asus for making a more compact flagship with a very large battery [2] was not in any way proportional to their sales. In this case, the battery life was actually superior to many larger competitors. Same for my Xperia 5 V, the compact phone I bought and used at the time, cause I walk my talk and have been following phone releases to a sufficient degree that I can assure everyone, there have been and are flagship speced, compact phones with good battery life, that no one ever buys. I'd love more options in the market, heck, I use both the Xperia 5 and an iPhone 15 Pro Max in a Clicks case, either for different situations, so am on both sides as a consumer. Simply, the lack of any actual market demand beyond online comments makes that impossible, we need to be honest here.
[0] https://www.apple.com/by/iphone-13/specs/
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
[2] https://www.asus.com/mobile-handhelds/phones/zenfone/zenfone...
Currently, foldable smartphones (the flip phone ones) seem to be the fashionable alternative to small phones, but they're even more expensive than the huge ones.
[0]: when Steve Jobs still ran the company at least
Which is a shame, because I can sympathize with most of these requests.
I want something like Kick-starter which operates the same way but isn't meant for funding the creator to get the upfront capital investment - just avoiding existing companies getting burned out of the "let's listen to a niche slice of our customers instead of appealing to the masses" mindset. Companies put up a weird product proposal and see if enough people will commit to buying it to at least break even.
Then, if there's enough of a commitment, those people get something they actually want. If there's not enough, then there's a specific reason that you can point to to explain why.
This is almost equivalent to the normal market model (people buy things they want, and niche products don't get made much), except with a more explicit feedback step, to help people realize that if they don't actually put their money where their mouth is, then things won't get made.
There's probably a better way to do this, but I'm not sure how. Ultimately I just want my non-electronic electric car.
I'm starting to see the same trend with laptops without a keyboard now. There's an entire generation of 8-16 yos who never used a keyboard and type fast on ipad screens. In a decade, it's a real possibility that keyboardless laptops become the standard...
I bought Motorola Droid 4 when it came out. I was so desperate to have a new phone with physical QWERTY, that I bought it blindly, even though it wasn't available in Europe, even though I have never seen it, even though I knew it *didn't support mobile networks* in Europe for a few months, to be fixed by an update. I had to use a coworker who was going on vacation to Florida.
When it arrived, the first thing I saw was that the black screen during boot shines bright blueish, horribly bad contrast. Then when image appeared, I've learned that it has two subpixels per image pixel, for efficiency. This made single color areas show the pixels very visibly.
Then I took a photo. The quality reminded me of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone I had 6 years back, except the colors were much worse. Everything was blueish. It had a physical (touch) "search" button below the screen, but companies like Google didn't seem to understand why it would be useful to search for anything, so most of their apps didn't react to it. Especially Gmail.
But hey, I could touch-type any long message, and I could use SSH client conveniently (it even had a physical CTRL button).
Other than the keyboard (pretty solid too), it was one of the worst phones I ever had. So yeah, based on that model the market decided that "nobody wants keyboard phones", and the Droid 5 never came out.
Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.
---
1. Yes, I understand that these features were present in other phones, but the SE was the last phone actively sold by Apple that had them
No, the vast majority of people use their phones as video viewers, increasingly so after the rise of TikTok. I have family members in their 30s who don't have laptops or TVs, all media is consumed through their phone, and for most kids/teens across the world it is their primary video consumption device.
The average person is trying to maximize screen size relative to portability. And the market is everyone on earth. That's it.
My ideal phone is something small and rugged with physical keys that supports Android Auto for navigation and a few other basic apps I need (Bitwarden basically).
But there aren't hundreds of millions of people like me. And the bar for "success" is selling that many units so it gets considered a "failure"
But the existence of the yellow one helped sell the black one.
That's a typical issue for car sales by the way.
Apple apparently sold a couple million iPhone 13 minis. Ford reliably sold more than 100,000 Focus cars in the US annually before deciding to discontinue it. But Apple and Ford decided they were better served redirecting that engineering effort towards more profitable projects.
It just frustrating when these gaps occur and there's no smaller player to fill them. A couple million small smartphones or a couple hundred thousand compact cars sounds like enough to sustain a business, but it isn't enough for the big players to care, and small players can't affordably create a competitive offering.
The bar appears too low to prospective customer because they lose nothing if they try this product but ultimately decide to not buy but for business it is clear loss.
This is like those mythical users who'd buy Macs once its fully hackable and officially support linux. Apple thinks it is just better to not serve those buyers.
Of all the people who prioritize those features when buying a new phone, only ~100k users end up buying a fairphone every YEAR.
A company like Samsung needs to produce roughly 10x this volume BEFORE launch just to fill their sellout channels, so their financial risk for a global ramp-up is much higher.
There are a lot of people who probably would've bought the mini but instead of opted for the SE because battery life degraded so quickly.
Software aside, I’ve heard mixed things about the keyboard on the Titan. Keeping an open mind though, I would like to support companies filling this niche.
The only thing that used less power on the mini was the smaller screen, but that doesn't save enough power to make up for a physically smaller battery.
I haven't upgraded yet.
Why does everyone (most of you too?) like bigger screens? The mini screen is big enough for HN, reddit, banking, photos, etc.
If you install Lineage or something, isn't that essentially a non-issue?
Otherwise those seem great! Never heard of them.
Within one year, the screen size of nearly all mass-market smartphones took a huge bump from 5.x" to 6.5", because of two ODMs (device manufacturers who are contracted by big brands to design and produce smartphones). Those two ODMs won contracts to produce mass-market devices for the brands Lenovo/Motorola, Huawei and Xiaomi based on a 6.5" 720p LCD.
The total volume forecast was so big, that suddenly 6.5" displays were cheaper than any other 720p smartphone panel. Other Smartphone brands adjusted mid-development because the larger panel also made the PCBs and batteries cheaper. In that year, mass-market devices with 1080p displays were often smaller (which was contradictory for a vendor-portfolio until then) because there was no such economics of scale on higher-resolution panels.
So within a single year, displays got a full inch larger, not because the consumer demanded it but because of supply-chain dynamics.
Although, it's not exactly what he wished for in 2022 since it doesn't run standard Android and obviously doesn't have industrial design like the iPhone mini.
Using the jelly star proved that using a small screen is not a problem for me and I would gladly pay money for an experience like that.
But it also proved that it is not an acceptable option in terms of quality. Hopefully the Jelly Max is better in these regards.
I think Jelly Max the ideal size for me too (jelly star was a little too small for doing driving navigation). I'll keep an ear out
If we're counting 5.9" we might as well count the Galaxy S series at 6.1". (My choice of phone, incidentally.)
Similar to the „ARTE effect“: When French TV audiences where polled, frequently around 10% responded, that they were watching Arte (an artsy government funded intelligentsia TV channel) on a daily basis.
yet the ratings rarely surpass 2%
As it stands the kind of people who want a smaller phone almost by definition need to be a bit savvier than the market in general to know such a thing still exists and along with that will have greater skepticism towards Android phones having any kind of post market support.
It'd basically have to come from Samsung to hit the all the price/quality/trust requirements. Feel like they've already got a lot of the pieces there with their corporate targeted XCover range just shrink them down a bit.
Blackberries? Granted, they failed but for a completely different reason.
My original point was that I expect a big difference in people's stated vs observed preference on this one.
Maybe if it was priced like a Nissan Versa.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/ga...
Per my suggestion, Apple should have scrapped the 13 Mini completely and instead offered a 13 Pro Compact for $999. Or maybe even $1049 if it had a bigger battery than the standard Pro model. The profit would have been much higher per unit than the 13 Mini, and I imagine they might have sold more units as well.
I’m typing this on a 13 Mini, and I would have paid an extra $400 for a better camera and more battery life. Before I had this phone, I bought a 15 Pro, used it for a week, and returned it because it was uncomfortably large.
> Combined, all four iPhone 13 models made up 71 percent of iPhone sales, with the standard 6.1-inch iPhone 13 responsible for 38 percent of sales. The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max weren't quite as popular as the iPhone 13, but sold much better than the iPhone 13 mini.
In fact, the iPhone 13 alone sold more (38%) than the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max combined (30%). The plain old 13 was the most popular SKU, because no, most people do in fact not spend more for an added telephoto camera only a specific few have a true need for. The regular non Pro iPhone has across most years been the best seller, because it is a solid middle ground for the vast majority of people, making it the best basis for a small SKU to have any hope of succeeding. A 13 Pro Compact would have absolutely sold as poorly, maybe even worse than the 13 mini, considering both Pros did not outsell the regular 13 by itself. But even if a 13 Pro Compact had sold twice as well as the 13 mini (a very generous assumption considering it would have been 300usd more expensive), that would still be only 6% of total sales, a drop in the bucket.
Lastly, there are the Xperia 5s and there have been the Zenfones, both having better battery life than their large competitors, both being as (un)popular as Apples efforts.
Again, I like small smartphones, I'd love there to be a significant market for them. There simply is no way to look at the data and claim there is one beyond a tiny niche that a company such as Apple cannot realistically serve.
Apple tried converting their most successful SKU into a small smartphone. That failed to sell even a tenth of its large brother, despite being 100usd cheaper.
Sony literally scales their flagship down and gives it better battery life. Not really a success either.
ASUS made their own, fully dedicated line of compact smartphones which again, had better battery life than most large competitors and even included a 3.5mm jack, getting a second niche of customers to bolster sales. They too saw so few sales that they were forced to pivot to gigantic phones.
No matter what conditions, no matter how favorable, the same result.
I have no idea why that was the case and can't even speculate since I don't know enough about how the networks worked, but I would love to hear an explanation. I was pretty annoyed by the fact that I still needed to own what I considered a phablet, which was sitting collecting dust on my bedside table at home just so I could have the type of phone I really wanted. Seemed like a punishment-by-design for trying to step off the typical customer rails.
My tastes have changed slightly these days, and I'm okay with a 5.X" screen or whatever, but now I want it to be eInk or something similar and focus more on text/sms as I've gotten pretty minimalism with my phone use.
The end result will be a $100 quality phone.
This is an odd conclusion considering that the Droid 4 was already the FOURTH iteration of a QWERTY device from that ONE brand on that ONE carrier, each iteration selling less than the one before as each faced more competition.
If you're interested, the actual reason for the end of the Droid QWERTY series was that the entire "Droid" brand was a Verizon-exclusive product-line with a big focus in sales and big budget in Marketing, just to compete with the iPhone (which was not available on Verizon until 2011).
For a vendor to win a slot in that lineup meant that Verizon Sales and Marketing put all weight behind selling that device, no matter what device it is. This made the Droid 1 and 2 a huge success, not because of the product but because of the sales channel.
But in year 3 (2011), the iPhone launched on Verizon, which put a huge dent in both sales-focus and budget of Verizon's "Droid" product-line.
Later that year, Droid 3 launched but was selling significantly less than its predecessors.
In that year, Verizon instead sold 6.5m iPhones (up from ZERO iPhones the year before).
So Motorola had to cut their losses on the already ongoing development of the Droid 4, the device was redesigned for a much lower total sales-expectation and then launched in 2012.
But the sales turned out even lower than expected: By Q4 2012 Verizon sold 14m Smartphones, with 10m (!) of them being iPhones.
The most successful Motorola device of that year was the Droid RAZR MAXX HD, a non-QWERTY flagship.
It was clear: That QWERTY keyboard didn't drive sales.
Don’t take me wrong: I do agree that "the vast majority of people use their phones as video viewers", but the duration/day is not uniform and many don’t want/need to carry a half-tablet all day long in case someone shared a tiktok on the messaging group.
Yeah, because in the 5 years before that, the much MUCH more diverse Smartphone industry tried to make it work for several YEARS and failed.
Of all companies, Sony had the longest stamina, releasing 5 generations of 'compact' flagship devices.
If there would have been a sufficiently sized market for that, they would have continued and grown. In reality their business decreased every year.
Today the Smartphone is dominantly a media-consumption device, the only viable answer to "tiny Android flagship" is now a foldable like the Galaxy Flip.
What should be much more annoying is this: There is roughly half of the entire Smartphone ecosystem systematically isolated from free market-forces by a single brand, with the other half isolated by an OS. So even if a company would come along with a compelling compact phone, if it cannot instantly replace everything Apple offers, that company can only address HALF of its potential market, and ONLY if it's based on Android then.
That's not relevant, as this is then forming our decision at the point-of-sale towards a media consumption device.
> many don’t want/need to carry a half-tablet all day long in case someone shared a tiktok on the messaging group.
Only while no media is consumed. Many people take less than one photo a day on average, but still the camera quality is a dominant decision-factor.
I'd even argue that the majority of price-premium paid by a customer today is for camera and display. Those will be the factors at the point of sale to decide whether to pay 50-100 USD more or not...
The paying market for larger phones also contains the potential market for smaller phones.
There is no ADDITIONAL market in selling smaller phones, and not enough free market to make users switch brand for a smaller phone. So there is nothing to gain.
Crucially, even if 10% of the iPhone users want a smaller phone, they won't buy a smaller phone unless it's compatible to the iOS ecosystem. So roughly half of the market can only be effectively converted by Apple and for Apple it turned out to be not profitable enough to convert them.
That is one thing that is more disgusting about using a smart phone now days. When iPhone first came out it is about a music player and phone with extra features to facilitate real life things.
I don't want a freaking small computer in my pocket, and looking at small screens for long period of time is just NOT good for our eyes or postural.
We need to start treat these small devices as something we interact with very occasionally to facilitate real life interaction, not get our face stuck to it.
Not that working on laptop or workstation is much better, but it is better than writing on and viewing a video on small screen.
No. They were a) rare and b) much more expensive. AFAIK only Blackberry had a phone with QWERTY keyboard.
Buttons are much more expensive than a touchscreen (see cars for examples).
https://www.gsmarena.com/asus_zenfone_9-11656.php
https://www.gsmarena.com/asus_zenfone_10-12380.php
Be aware that you'd need to live in a place with very good public charging infrastructure due to the ~220 km range. The infrastructure is there here in Denmark where I live and daily-drive a 2017 Ioniq.
All-in-all the Ioniq sold well enough that Hyundai release a facelift in 2020. And the most recent facelifts of the successor-Ioniqs (5 and 6) have moved back to a more button-based interface (AFAIK).
People do ask the wrong questions.
Yes, I would buy the phone with the keyboard, but the keyboard is not the single most important feature. After the Desire Z there simply was nothing comparable. If it was 400 instead of 300 I would have said no, if it was from a brand I hate because they mess up the default Android install I might have said no. If it was 1:1 like some other phone except the battery being atrocious I might have said no.
The problem is that they are changing 10 variables at a time, including size, cost, software, camera, battery, whatever.
That said I wish they'd release a thicker version to compensate
You're being willfully obtuse here. It is the smaller version of the cheaper version of the iPhone. It's not a small pro, and that's what the original person was talking about.
And... I love it and use it all the time. Into the pocket it goes, great for going out.
I would buy an iphone mini 16/17/18 no questions asked.
When it comes to the marketing side of things, I think back to a story where one of the soft drink companies tried to find the best soft drink taste. They found out that they couldn't optimize for the one true taste because... different people had different favorites.