Do you need a small but high-end smartphone, which provides all the existing generation of larger screen devices in a much smaller space?
Eric Migicovsky does. The founder of smartwatch company Pebble unveiled his dream smartphone on a new online page in 2012 (www. smallandroidphone. com) and expects 50,000 passionate followers to submit a petition to get the attention of Android manufacturers:
“It’s becoming increasingly apparent that a small premium phone is rarely on an OEM’s roadmap. So I made the decision to take the issue into my own hands. My purpose here is to rally other small phone enthusiasts and put pressure on Google/Samsung/anyone who makes a small phone. “
There’s a long list of dream specs, but the key pieces on the wish list are a screen that’s less than six inches and matches the iPhone thirteen Mini, a dual-lens camera formula that matches that of the Pixel 5, runs the Android operating inventory formula with an unlocked bootloader, and is powered through the SnapDragon 8 series.
At present, no phone on the market meets those specifications demanded for experienced users. Surely you just want a manufacturer to recognize small, sturdy jobs with it?The challenge is that when consumers were presented with small phones that met the specifications of a high-end phone in the past. . . they weren’t buying enough.
The most productive example here is Apple. The iPhone 12 Mini was advertised as a small iPhone with the same features and functions as the regular iPhone 12. In addition to being an iOS device and serving a very closed market, the sheer number of iPhone enthusiasts suggests that there are enough of them who need a small smartphone to make it a simple win for Apple.
Reader, it is not a simple victory for Apple.
Time and again, order books for smaller iPhones have shrunk, while larger iPhones have taken a larger share of the market. Although Apple has the iPhone SE, it’s a mid-range phone when you look at the rest of the specs beyond size.
. . . however, the iPhone SE is again much more popular than the iPhone Mini. Apple enthusiasts looking for a smaller length chose the iPhone SE knowing not only that the specs (such as screen length) were inferior to those of the iPhone mainline, but that an iPhone Mini would launch a few months later.
With trendy components, the specs of a smaller smartphone that sits in the middle of diversity worth the diversity don’t want to be exceptional, they just want to be smart enough to get the task done.
And that’s where the argument about small phones comes in. If you’re pushing hard for a physically smaller size, the market has proven time and time again that bringing flagship specifications to a small area doesn’t sell. If you want to sell a phone with flagship specifications, you will want to increase the size.
Over the years of iteration, the smartphone market has been stratified into well-defined market spaces. It has its very giant very high-end phones in the most sensible (and above, the foldable). It has its high-end and quite size phones, its medium- and medium-sized phones, some medium- and smaller-sized phones, before touching the medium- to low-sized phones at the bottom of the price range.
Will there be a call for phones outside those slices?Certainly. At the time of writing, there are 24,000 signatures on the site. Which is, I suppose, two orders of magnitude less than it would take for any major Android manufacturer to be interested in starting to study the project’s perspective.
You can’t get what you want. Any hardware assignments will have to have trade-offs. And the compromise on a small smartphone with the best specifications is simple. . . there is very little advertising interest. This has already been tried and there is no explanation as to why to return to those conclusions.
Now the latest smartphone headlines in Forbes’ weekly Android Tour roundup. . .