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I want a repairable phone. A phone where I can replace the battery
And screen. And buttons.
I also want something that’s supported more than 3 years so there’s a point to repairing it. Ideally, support should come from the community so it can be infinite as long as someone is willing to do the work.
Based on https://postmarketos.org/install/ the Nokia N900 can run the latest stable release of PostmarketOS.
Nokia N900 was a proper Linux-powered phone released in Nobember 2009.
So yeah, it’s been getting over 15 years of community support so far.
What’s wrong with Fairphone then? Think I’m gonna buy FP 6 when it arrives
I’ve also been looking at FP but I believe there are some issues of getting one outside of Europe.
We only get FF 4 here (US), and through a reseller (Murena). And my understanding is that there are caveats in the bands it supports.
I am in the US, and bought my FP5 through clove technologies in the UK. I’m on T-Mobile and get 5G and everything.
No Jack.
They are pretty expensive for the hardware.
Unless I’m misremembering don’t they charge flagship prices but have midrange specs?
Unfortunately, that’s the cost you pay for a more “ethical” phone. Apple, Samsung, and all the mainstream phones are cheaper because they are subsidized by underpaid labor and sometimes even child labor.
(Not judging people who buy mainstream phones, just stating the reality.)
Hum… So Fairphone ?
I really wanted to buy the Fairphone 5, but they don’t ship replacement parts to where I live which makes the entire concept pointless.
Forward shipping exists.
OK, so that’s a possibility, but when you start adding a ~$30 fee on top of the cost of the part and shipping from Fairphone you’re looking at about $100 per repair, which stops making sense pretty quickly. You’re better off spending a little more money on a good device that is dust- and moisture-sealed and taking care of it for a few years.
Makes sense. But you can offset part of the shipping from the fact that you can easily do the repair yourself.
Another possibility would be the HMD Skyline. Less repairable than Fairphones, but still far easier than most other smartphones. Only 2 years of updates though.
But starting from 2027, a removable battery will be mandatory for all smartphone in the EU, which mean most, if not all smartphone will switch to removable battery. This may also make repair a lot easier.
Unsure why you were downvoted. This is true
For being too forward, maybe?
Fairphone
I’m curious, how repairable? Like comfortable with a solder iron or slots and what not like a PC?
Repairable phones would be great but the demand for them hasn’t undone the cost of design for them. There’s a lot of tech in an incredibly small package, so repairable phone would still require people to have specialty equipment to repair.
Like very few people own an oven for working with BGA chips. And if we go with socket based chips, the thickness of the phone has to increase or the battery has to decrease.
Don’t get me wrong, I think an open and repairable phone would be great. But having one is an engineering challenge that most phone makers have opted to just skip putting dollars into because the demand for one doesn’t justify the cost. Your average buyer is just chasing shiny and doesn’t see repairing their dinosaur as valuable.
But yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty here that would love such a device. Sadly we are not the majority.
Replacing SMT components would fall outside of repairability for 99.99999% of people. More realistically things like ports, screens, and batteries should be replaceable since they’re typically connected to the main board with cables.
Imo I don’t think the goal is/should be “every part is repairable by any average person without tools” tbh. Like that would be awesome but it also isn’t realistic, like you said phones are super complicated. But making simple repairs – stuff like swapping a battery – possible for anybody is realistic imo, and then the rest should be as easy to repair as possible for local shops or someone who does have the necessary skills and equipment. At least personally I feel like that’s a good spot to aim for.
HMD (Nokia) Skyline has a cool feature where you unscrew 1 screw and can change various things like battery. Unfortunately phone itself is not impressive especially from OS update standpoint (only 2 year support for major Android versions). I would love to see this idea being copied by other manufacturers.
Unfortunately phone itself is not impressive especially from OS update standpoint
I swear to god manufacturers do this on purpose so that they can point to the low volume of sales and claim “See! People don’t really want these features” when in reality they’ve just slapped a couple good features onto a completely dog shit device.
Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can’t go back because they don’t sell any small phones.
I picked the Pixel 8 because:
- it runs GrapheneOS
- It was a little smaller than the Pixel 8 Pro
If there was a smaller version available, I would’ve gotten that instead.
I can’t trust anything made by google. It’s a company that literally makes its money capturing everything everyone does on the internet…and yet the phone they make is the ONLY phone immune to having everything captured…
Sorry. Not buying it. There will be a chip in there phoning home we’ll find out about in a decade.
I doubt that, but I respect the skepticism. I happen to trust the GrapheneOS devs to reveal if that was the case.
I’ve been using the “A” branch of the Pixel line for years now.
But I use CalyxOS so I guess you and I have to be enemies now. My name is Inigo Montoya, you use a different OS, prepare to die.
I picked the Pixel A because:
- It runs GrapheneOS
- It’s slightly smaller and slightly cheaper than the normal version
- The back is plastic and not glass
Glad I can use it and type on it one-handed, can’t imagine using a bigger phone.
The only A series Pixel phone smaller than the Pixel 8 was the Pixel 4a.
I picked the Sony Xperia 1v because:
- 71mm width (similar to pixel 8)
- Flagship specs (*for 2023 - Snapdragon 8 gen2 / 12gb)
- not Google Samsung or Apple
- little to no bloatware
- Decent cameras
- SD card expandable
- Headphone jack 3.5mm (though I haven’t used it yet)
- No glass back (and solid build quality allround)
- LineageOS support (for when vendor support runs out)
- I got a good refurb deal in 2024
I was considering a Zenphone 10 or Xperia 5 v - mainly for size and brand reasons as above - when i found this for £650
I picked the 5ii for similar reasons at the time.
The problem is it only gets 2 years of support, so I haven’t gotten an update in years. Sony is living in 2010.
The fingerprint reader slowly stopped working 6 months ago via a prolific software bug that is all over forums for xperias that will never be fixed.
The battery (even ONLY charging it to 80% using battery care) is horrific after a few years, mediocre when I got it and the standby time is shit. It loses 1.5-2% battery per hour not being used at all now. I get maybe 4h SOT browsing (much less with video).
The default camera app is crap and not even worth using…
I want to try lineageOS when I get the time to see if it fixes the battery and fingerprint reader, but here in Belgium we really need access to our bank apps because almost everything is done through there.
Edit: also the xperia 1v absolutely has a glass back… Are you sure you have one? https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_1_v-12263.php
Is there an 8a? Those are usually the smallest model
There is. The screen is smaller, but the actual phone is bigger 🤦♂️
I upgraded to a Sony Xperia XZ2 compact last year. It has a 5" screen and decent capabilities, the only down side is it doesn’t support 5G. For a phone that’s over 5 years old, it’s probably the most recent usable phone available which actually fits in my pocket.
Seriously, don’t show me a damn tablet computer and try to sell it to me as a mobile phone. If you can’t make a compact phone then you’re not really advancing the technology, are you?
If I can’t use it one-handed (using ALL physical buttons and ALL parts of the screen), then it’s not a phone.
Seriously, this is how we used to define the difference between phones and tables - one-hand or two-hand use.
Right? I mean I’m still lamenting the loss of slider keyboards, typing on a screen is so damn unreliable that I was forced to turn on the auto-correction, which itself is highly unreliable and constantly changing real words while failing to fix the words where I hit a number instead of a letter (the word “9f” gets typed a LOT!). I use my phone for phone calls and sending texts, with a secondary usage as a GPS in my truck. If it can’t perform one of three basic tasks then what good is it?
I’ve been maining a Unihertz Jelly Star, I quite like it.
They do, but service providers don’t like selling them. There isn’t as much of a return on smaller/ dumb/ cheap phones. I used to work at spectrum, and we’d speak of the cheap phones in hushed tones like they were the boogeyman. It felt horrible because I was using my cheap android while selling people iPhone 15s.
So once again instead of providing choice the market is simply phasing out things with smaller profit margins as if they planned it together in some kind of cartel.
Demand also isn’t there. The iPhone SE sold ok, but the other thing to keep in mind was that it was the cheap iPhone too so it’s supposed to sell.
If it was outselling the main model every year then they’d keep making them small. But they didn’t so they got dropped.
Not really, even the cheap phones have large screens now. There’s no correlation anymore between price and screen size, the cheap phones just have lower quality panels.
I’m clinging to my SE. It’s the last small phone made by anyone other than Chinese no-names. I will be sad when it’s no longer viable as an option.
my Chinese tiny phone has a name, it’s the Unihertz Jelly Star. they even have a subreddit, not sure what makes you think it’s a “no name” they make a lot of phones for niches in today’s world including one with a physical qwerty keyboard.
now the fact that they’re the only company filling those niches sucks, but it’s better than nobody doing it.
Well, how’s it supported? This is usually what kills these phones. Even brand like Xiaomi dump their non-flagship model really soon. I have one, bought as a new model, was officially supported for like a year. Great.
I don’t understand why so many people here keep saying that it’s too hard to make a small phone when all these companies literally make watches with 5G connections…
They always lean a little too hard into making the small one the “budget” phone and end up gimping it into something nobody wants, and yet they still don’t make it cost attractive.
Compared to the SomePhone Pro, the SomePhone Mini has:
- 6GB of RAM rather than 8. (I mean, okay, what do I need that much RAM for?)
- 128GB onboard storage rather than 512GB (Those chips are the same footprint so that wasn’t done for miniaturization, but I don’t store a lot on my phone so ok)
- No SD card slot. (I suppose you could argue that IS for miniaturization but it’s still a kick in the pants)
- 1080p display rather than 4k. (fine, the PPI is still finer than my eyes)
- 3100mAh battery instead of 3600 (You know the reduced resolution on the display will probably make up for that anyway)
- No NFC (really?)
- No fast charging (fucking sigh)
- No wireless charging (pegwarmer says what?)
- 5.9 inch 9:21 display (so it’s 89% the size of the Pro model anyway?)
- a laptop grade VGA camera (you’re actively trying to make this product fail, aren’t you?)
- Locked bootloader, locked carrier (because of course)
- $899 instead of $949 MSRP (Okay just stop saying words and drown yourself in the septic tank)
This is exactly the problem. I don’t need a budget phone, I need a small phone
Hell I wish the big phones had SD card slots…
There are very very few phones that have them anymore. Chinese phones, Sony, fairphone, and Samsung midrange, that is about it…
The latest pixel pro is available in both the regular size and the XL. In previous models the pro was only available as the XL.
The “small” P9P is considerably larger than the iPhone 12/13 mini, which is the size OP wants.
What’s the website you used to make this? I used to have it bookmarked a long time ago but I can’t find it anywhere now.
I don’t want a small phone or a slide out keyboards.
I want :
Replaceable battery.
Non glass back.
3.5 jack.Galaxy Xcover series.
3.5 jack is easy, most budget phones have them (along with a MicroSD card slot)
The replaceable battery? That’s gonna be hard to find. There the obvious Fairphone, but its very costly for its specs and is only made for EU, and even if someone from the US imports it, the only US carrier allowing it is Tmobile.
Samsung Galaxy XCover series have IP67 Water resistance, headphone jack, and MicroSD card slot, and the replaceable battery, but its specs are not that good for its cost (as reported by various Reddit users).
I wouldn’t trust the water resistance tho. One drop into a puddle and the back comes off exposing the internals.
The xcovers backs usually stay on when you drop them and the back only really holds the battery in. The internals are protected by another layer of plastic.
As you say the specs do suck though.
3.5 jack.
They exist, but it’ll constrain your phone choices a lot.
I’d just get a USB-C-to-1/8"-TRS adapter. If you want to charge while playing, you can get one with passthrough.
Without passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-Female-Samsung-Devices/dp/B08Z3B5QL3
or with passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/ZOOAUX-Headphone-Charging-Earphones-Compatible/dp/B094Z6149B
Can probably just leave the thing plugged into your headphones.
Yeah I get they exist, but I will lose that in a day
Just leave it plugged into the headphones, don’t even take it off. I mean, I have 1/4 inch audio hardware, and I’ve got 1/8 inch headphones that have a 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch adaptor that just lives on the end.
I totally understand people who want to use wired, TRS headphones. They’re inexpensive, widespread, aren’t going to become e-waste when their battery dies, aren’t going to become obsolete when radio protocols move on, are lightweight, don’t suffer from radio interference etc. I have a bunch of TRS headphones and like them. Only downside is that they need some power source if you want to do ANC, but it’s not like one has to have ANC.
But…I think that a lot of people are treating it as a “we live in a Bluetooth world or a wired headphones world, and which we do depends on whether there’s a TRS jack on the phone itself”.
I’d also add that if you have a USB-to-TRS device acting as your DAC, you can swap in others, aren’t stuck with the on-phone DAC. I had a phone that had an extremely obnoxious tendency to, when charging in the car, play noise back through the headphones Jack (and thus to my car’s aux jack and through the speakers). Was fine on Bluetooth. Problem was that the manufacturer had failed to stick the proper filtering circuitry in the power supply for the DAC and was spewing noise from USB power into the audio output, probably because you couldn’t see a problem when the phone was running on battery and filtering circuitry for the DAC uses up space in the cramped confines of the phone. (In practice, USB power can be amazingly dirty – I was astonished watching some people with oscilloscopes look at the power lines on USB.) Anyway, the noise was appalling. If you use the built-in DAC, you can’t really change the thing out. With an external DAC, you can stick a reasonable one in.
I don’t know how the ones I linked to above perform. But I’m confident that if they are a problem, there are other DACs out there. Whereas with a built-in jack, you get the DAC that the phone manufacturer provides, and clearly some are willing to ship their phones with an inadequate DAC.
I’d kind of like to see someone set up a rig with intentionally-dirty USB power and a bunch of USB audio interfaces and USB-powered devices with an audio output and then see how much noise leaks through into the DAC.
Why can’t we go back to small phones?
I think this is correlation, not causation, as this was also when touch screens started being made
it’s also when mobile media in general was available on your phone. tv, movies, YouTube, games, everything. not everything is about porn.
not everything is about porn.
You speak only for yourself.
I definitely was looking at porn on my 240x320 Nokia screen.
240x320
One boob takes up 76000 of your 76800 pixels.
You overestimate the resolution of porn back then. 90s kids needed some imagination to fill in the gaps…
Oh, I remember. Full res pic above the collar bone, then that weird speckled rendering for a couple lines and then… grey.
Because most people use their phone as their main, if not only, device, so a bigger screen is more desirable to consume content.
By that logic everyone should buy a foldable
I would if they were more durable, easier to repair and cheaper…
I would, if long term durability is not a concern and the price is not too damn expensive.
Basically if money is no issue.
“Why can’t we go back to small phones”
Company releases small phone
“No one” buys it
Company stops making small phones
People complaining why there are no small phones
no one bought it because it was shit. companies do this all the time so they can make more expensive things more cheaply, and force people into buying the most expensive.
I want an easily removable battery. As in, I want to be able to have two batteries, one in my phone and another in a charger and I just swap them once a day. I used to be able to do that, and it was normal. Now, the only phones that have that are either extremely garbage or also feature a barcode scanner and cost as much as a “flagship” device.
“because it was shit” if you look at the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini they were essentially the same phone just in different sizes, while the sales of the mini stayed in the low 1 diget % the iPhone 13 was around 35-40% of all iPhone sales in it’s first year.
I agree with some of the things in your 2nd part it has nothing to do with small phones.
And not to say you said it but it came up in the article a couple times, comparing screen inch sizes to determine if a phone is big or not is flawed > the screen to body ratio increased a lot over the last year’s which means that a phone could have the same physical size with a bigger screen.
To be fair, these are Apple users we’re talking about. They uhh… kind of epitomize rampant American consumerism.
@BlueBaggy @corbin as a tiny-handed person, I resent being called “no one”
Don’t forget that company does fuck all in advertising the small phone at a similar level as the “regular sized” phone
How many times is this going to be regurgitated? The question has been well and truly answered.
We don’t buy them.
That, and small phones on the Android side are often nerfed beyond reason, like a bottom-of-the-barrel Mediatek SoC with low RAM and shit storage option instead of the bigger model’s Snapdragon and quality storage, or shit cameras, or garbage screen resolution, etc etc.
There is something to be said about the larger variant having more room for better cameras, but outside of that, the nerfing feels almost intentional.
Not to mention: the old people (the ones with money) can’t see them.
Fuck off. I want a small phone
They don’t care about “you”. They care about their “consumers” (as in, you in bulk), who don’t buy them.
It’s capitalism; simple as that.
But I want mine to have a goatee, why doesn’t apple give iPhone a goatee?
How many times is this going to be regurgitated?
OP is an iPhone user. They’re very used to their tiny phones and they love them and simply can’t understand why everyone wants a large phone.
I do, I bought smallest phone available from known company. But most of those companies just decided you need huge phone that can’t fit everywhere, removed sdcard slot, removed headphone jack. Last time I remember nobody asked them to remove those features. I think it is the same enshittification like with everything, they no longer make cheap houses, smaller cheaper cars, actual budget gpus etc, etc. Feels like every company targets top 20% and the rest - gtfo and be damned.
Because every time a manufacturer releases a small phone, nobody buys them.
Well yeah, the people who want a small reliable phone are unlikely to replace them every year for no discernible reason. Cue more articles and comments about how there’s no sale data to support the idea that people want small phones! The odds are stacked against us.
Yes please. I really dislike iOS, but I use the iPhone 13 Mini for work and it’s the perfect form factor. I desperately want an Android phone that’s the same size, but I’m rocking a Flip which is the best I can do for small form factor right now.
The iPhone 13 mini was the perfect size and if Apple would have used that as a base for their new SE instead of the shitty 16e, I would have bought it in a heartbeat. Just give me a thicc 13 mini with a good battery, camera and a new processor.
Same, and I’ve never used an iOS device as a daily driver outside to work. I would literally dump my whole investment in the Android ecosystem over favourable form factor, especially now that Apple is on board with USBC.
I’d buy another 13 Mini, but I’m worried about how long it’ll be before planned obsolescence takes over.
Why can’t we have both? I want a bigger phone. Bigger than what I have now, and many people would consider this to be a fairly large phone.
But I don’t want to stop people who want smaller phones from having those, too.
You can already get big phones though.
They’re saying the smartphone market is too homogenous and there should be more options so that people actually have a choice in the device they buy.
Yeah, but most cries (including this article) aren’t “We want both” but “We want small instead”. The article goes out of its way to ridicule “huge” phones.
The battle cry seems to be demanding it their way instead of variety.
Right? Everybody has different size hands, my hands are on the larger side and these bigger phones of today are actually pretty comfortable to me
I have fairly small hands, but still prefer a larger phone. More content on the screen and space for battery.
HOWEVER, I’d take both. A small phone would be a good secondary device. I want something modern the size of my Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830i). The back also has a really nice texture.
Oh, yeah, it also has a headphone jack, MicroSD card slot and quickly swappable battery which I should probably replace because it seems it has slightly increased its capacity… volumetric capacity.But I also prefer a bit more thickness so it doesn’t feel like a fragile, slippery sheet of glass (rugged phones are good for that).
Yep, got big hands myself and own an S21+, and the keys on the keyboard are still too fucking small. Sick of correcting nytypos after 10 years, so finally not giving a fuck.
Ironically, i typed this entire comment without a typo, gotta love how that works.
Edit: oh wit, found onr. Guess y’all just gotta deal with ut.
This author should’ve spent digging into the iPhone 12 / 13 mini, and how it was received in Apple communities a few years ago.
That experiment really showed that the small phone demographic is passionate and vocal, but small (no pun intended). Those phones sold well when the small-phone-fans ran out to buy them, but the sales numbers cooled off quick.
Given that Apple is working on a lightweight 17 “air” phone, my guess is that they learned screen size is too important for too many people, but they’re going to see if they can strike a middle ground with weight / pocket fit.
we can’t have small phones because the os design can only be so flexible before it starts either being crap at every size or having so many edge cases that internally it’s stupid complex.
having limited sizes means the sizes they do have can be well covered
people spend a third of their lives on those things. And while cumbersome, a big screen simply is better for media consumption
only way I see smaller phones make a comeback is if we change our habits or if a new technology comes along
