Hopefully the next Fairphone closes that spec gap. I could easily live with 2022 specs for a long time, giving plateauing performance gains, as long as the phone is supported with updates.
Of course, I would also kill for a headphone jack and a 5.4-5.8" iphone mini-sized screen. It's so frustrating that I want to buy a fairphone but the compromises are too much.
Plus the M7 had a nicer aluminum unibody. The M8 had plastic on the front. Still handsome, but not the same level of gorgeous macbook-style design the M7 had. Fuck, I'd rock an M7 today if they trimmed the glass bezel down, removed the hardware nav buttons, and tossed in some new hardware.
If only we could get RCS with any app other than Google's. I wonder how long they can gatekeep those APIs.
Yeah, the small car thing is a perfect parallel. The market doesn't necessarily fit preferences perfectly: instead, companies optimise for whatever MOST folks will buy that nets them the most money.
They make more money selling a large phone with a bigger sticker price and a bigger profit margin, so they make big phones. And the most phone-hungry people, power users, who buy a new phone every year or so, tend to buy big phones. So they cater to that group.
Think of it this way: when I bought my iPhone SE 2016 7 years ago, I cast maybe $100 of profit "vote" in the marketplace.
Every time someone buys a $1700 folding phone, they cast something between $500 and $1000 of profit "vote" in the marketplace. And they do that every year, not once every 7.
Of course, I'd be willing to spend a lot more on a really decent small phone. But nobody in the market has really experimented with that model yet. And it is admittedly harder to fit components into a smaller phone body (though not as hard as Apple would have you believe -- after all, the 14 and 15 literally takes up more space with a useless empty plastic SIM card spacer than the headphone jack used to take.
I was going to say that the Mini should be pretty cheap now that it's two generations old -- the 13 is down to $629 new, after all, and the Mini ought to be $100 cheaper...
But it looks like Mini demand has actually driven prices much higher than the normal 13. Strange, almost as if there IS demand for small phones...
From the article:
“The problem is Apple has exclusive rights to [the iPhone Mini’s] display — so, even with the line being discontinued, [Samsung Display] isn’t going to give us access,” he told supporters last month.
Sounds like we're splitting hairs: no other OEM is ordering the Mini-sized display, and this line certainly implies some kind of exclusivity. I've been following the thread on the Small Android Phone discord as well, and what I've seen there aligns with that understanding.
As far as I know, no small manufacturer ever gets displays built specifically for them. Even Pebble, which was a lot more popular than Small Android Phone, used preexisting displays. It just takes a lot of time, knowledge, and money to create a custom display.
I'm definitely a small phone lover. I don't watch videos on my phone if I can avoid it and tend to consume text-heavy content.
Currently bouncing between an Xperia XZ1 Compact running Lineage 17.1 and an iPhone SE 2016 (!!!) running iOS 15. I get security updates for both, but it's clear that I'll have to move to a different phone in the next year or two.
Honestly at this point I just wish Apple would bring out an "iPhone Classic" based on the 4,5, or Mini body. Throw a headphone jack on there, a TouchID power button, and I'd pay serious money for it on launch day. I'd prefer an SD card slot, but if I know the phone will last for 3-5 years, I can pay a couple hundred extra bucks for 512GB of storage.
I just do not get folding phones. I understand that others like them, but I've never been a tablet guy. I suppose I would consider one with an internal e-ink screen, so I could combine my e-reader and phone into a single device... but I don't think I'd enjoy using a phone that's 1.5-2x the standard thickness of modern phones (not counting those massive camera bumps!). Plus the durability issue -- I would absolutely not trust any modern folding phone to last 5+ years, and at the $1000+ price point, it damn well better last 5+ years.
Above all else, I prefer small phones for two reasons:
It's really frustrating that phone companies don't bother with small phones any more. But nobody is even trying -- and never has tried -- to market a small phone that stays out of your way but helps you when you need it. Even Apple barely marketed the Mini at all (and debuted it during a global pandemic when a lot of people stopped commuting and traveling, two of the best times to have a small one-handable phone).
I wonder how much Apple fucked up the small phone market by maintaining exclusive access to the Mini screens from Samsung, as the author mentions in this article.
AOSP deserves to be split out from Google into some kind of open source nonprofit similar to Linux. It's obvious that Google has no intent of maintaining AOSP in a usable form, they've become completely distracted by Pixel software features.
The quick settings tiles and settings app are perfect examples. No custom color picker for the UI either? I HAVE to use one of the "AI"-generated suggestions, or one of 6 incredibly boring barely-different pastel variations? These things technically work, but almost seem designed to piss off the end user.
Makes sense. I can confirm there's a nice step-by-step procedure for the XZ1C, and it's been tested by at least dozens of folks, some of which have multiple devices.
I've also looked at the Atom L myself, please post a review if you do end up getting it and using a custom ROM on it! I chose the XZ1C over it because the Atom L is literally 2x the thickness of the XZ1C, which is already as thick as I'd like a phone to be. I'm curious if the thickness will bother you at all, and just how good the unlocking and custom ROM experience is on such a niche phone.
Why the official requirement? Just because you don't want the device to be abandoned? Or is there some other "official" value-add I'm unaware of?
I'm going to ignore the "official" requirement because I think your task might actually be impossible with that req.
I use an Xperia XZ1 Compact with LineageOS 20.
4.6" screen. Very similar in dimensions to the iPhone 5/5S, which had 4" screens (just a tiny bit winder, maybe a mm taller). Headphone jack. microSD slot with support up to 512GB. Side fingerprint sensor. Decent (not modern flagship quality, but also not an AI "image" generator) camera. Band 66 support (though no band 71). And a notification LED!
Sony only supported it with two software updates (big surprise) ending with Android 9 (Pie). The Sony website lets you unlock the bootloader with a self-serve portal. You can use the Xperifirm tool to flash stock software & firmware, and custom roms work as usual with flashing, TWRP, etc. The SD card makes custom ROMs an even simpler process.
Note that you need the US firmware for cellular band & network compatibility, but you can copy the two files related to fingerprint sensor usage (system_X-FLASH-ALL-C93B.sin and vendor_X-FLASH-ALL-C93B.sin) from CE1 (chinese) or UK firmware into the US firmware, flash it, and you'll get US firmware with a functional fingerprint sensor.
There's recent builds of Lineage 17,18,19, and 20 (unofficial, unfortunately) with relatively few compromises. Gapps versions and MicroG versions seem to get published once every month or two by the unofficial maintainers. Yes, they're unofficial. But they've been publishing new builds every month since 2019. And allegedly the only reason they haven't gone official is because Lineage puts some restrictions on packages you can include in official releases.
There's also HavocOS and a relatively recent /e/OS build, if you're into that.
Unfortunately my mobile provider (Google Fi) has some compatibility issues with these ROMs, but there seem to be dozens-to-hundreds of happy users out there. The modem has a tendency to crash when signal is completely lost, so if you live in the middle of nowhere like I do, I don't think I would recommend it. But if you live in a city or a country with competent infrastructure you should be fine.
The call microphone has a shitty physical design; it uses sound piped into a single, very long, very tiny hole in the bottom of the phone, next to the USB-C port. Guess what? Over time that tends to fill with dust, and then people can only hear you on calls if you hold the phone at the perfect angle, shout, or switch to speakerphone, which uses a different mic. Fortunately you can clean it pretty easily with a SIM card ejector.
TL;DR this is literally the last reasonably sized phone by a major manufacturer you can use as an actual smartphone with custom ROMs. And there's a good amount of custom ROM support out there.
The other one I would seriously look at is the Pixel 4a, but it's definitely above your size requirement. It might be more useful if you list a height limit or width limit to the phone size instead of a screen size limit -- for instance, I won't use anything taller than 135mm. But the iPhone SE (2016), XZ1 Compact, and iPhone 12/13 Mini all satisfy that requirement, despite having 4", 4.6", and 5.4" screens, respectively. Aspect ratios and bezels are weird!
No reason the state can't run their own Mastodon instance. Then they don't have to moderate anything except the comment sections on their own pages, but everyone can consume the content as they please.
I live in a region of the US recently effected by a freak natural disaster. The US Army Core of Engineers announced at 2AM last night that they might have to release water from a dam, adding to the floodwaters in an already flooded downtown near me. On Twitter. Which you can't view unless you create an account, and even then you might get rate limited. That's not an acceptable availability for a public emergency announcement.
If Mozilla really starts to go downhill, what are the chances we get a Linux kernel-style community fork that we can rely on instead? Curious why that hasn't happened before -- perhaps because Mozilla has always toed the line of not-quite-awful enough?
I just hope we can keep an alternative browser engine alive. Would be nice if some rich person would just set up a funding model that can pay a few devs to keep it going indefinitely without ads or spyware.