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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Flip phones were an important design constraint when phones featured physical hardware buttons. It was easier to flip open a phone to unlock it then press the weird key combos that some phones used.

With touch screens this is no longer a problem, and the design constraint for a flip phone is less relevant. If anything it now increases the time to unlock a phone if you have to flip it open first then authenticate with thumbprint or face scanner.

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Flip phones are also smaller when folded, so they are more pocketable. That alone is more important for me than most considerations.

Smaller in one dimension. Thicker in the other.

it's an object in three dimensions

The point is that the fold causes a trade-off - x/y for z.

I've got some pants with deep pockets but tight enough that my cased iPhone is too thick to comfortably fit. A folding phone like this wouldn't work at all.

Preferred that way, honestly. My galaxy s8 is too thin to hold easily for me. Especially with the bezel-less curved-edge screen.

I miss being able to reach the upper half of my phone's screen with one hand. We've normalized it a lot now, but compared to older smartphone generations it is downright awkward to hold a phone today.

But I don't really miss flip phones per se. Just smaller smartphones. The galaxy s4 was around the upper limit of how big I'd like my phone to be.

The Galaxy S4 was pretty much the perfect phone for me. Just the right size for my small hands, replaceable battery, rootable OS, and plenty of power and storage expandability for the time.

I think most people just use the pinky shelf, or some other method of reaching the top of the screen. Iphones have that gesture to shrink the screen instead or something

The verge review said it’s no thicker than the original razr, and that was considered pretty thin when it came out.

My wallet is thicker, so it would be alright.

I know what you mean, player. I got a bankroll in my pocket right now.

I bought a thick, heavy duty case for my phone to make up for the lack of thickness/durability. Few if any mobile phones will stand up to average day to day knocks, drops and bumps.

Unsure why phone manufacturers insist on trying to make their phones thinner and more fragile when everyone wraps them in a case of some description.

> Unsure why phone manufacturers insist on trying to make their phones thinner and more fragile when everyone wraps them in a case of some description.

Because consumers don't actually buy what they say they want.

I'm always seeing people demand more durable screens and longer battery life, and Motorola made the Droid Turbo 2 with a massive 3750 mAh battery and a truly shatter-proof screen. People dropped it from a drone onto concrete from over 500 feet and it survived [0]. It takes more than one smack with a hammer to break the screen. [1]

And yet, nobody bought it, because when it comes to make a purchase, people still want phones that look sleek and modern, which means thin and a back made out of glass, because plastic is ugly, and metal interferes with wireless charging.

Motorola's been producing phones for years that have the features people actually ask for. They made Android phones with physical keyboards up to 2012 [2]. I remember seeing polls about phones with QWERTY keyboards back then and so many people saying they want one, but when it came to actually buy, they'd rather get an iPhone with a screen that shatters if you sneeze.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJOL5ikuZA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaiEIlPxnok

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_4

Same here. I cannot stand the size of phone's today. Mine is 6" and I hate it. My old Motorola G3 was the perfect size. I'd still use it, if it didn't eat SD cards (and only have a 4GB hard drive).

Yeah. I just got a new phone last week and after a bunch of research ended up settling on a Pixel 3a, which is even larger than the already-too-large 1st gen Pixel that it replaced. I hate it. There are no decent small (<5") phones on the market, and haven't been for half a decade. Sony's Xperia Compact line was the closest, but it 1) doesn't come with stock Android, 2) doesn't have a headphone jack, and 3) has been discontinued, which I guess indicates that these don't sell. Sigh.

I went straight from an iPhone SE to a Pixel 3a. I was really sad to give up my tiny screen.

> There are no decent small (<5") phones on the market

This is a major reason behind why I've stuck with my iPhone 5S since the end of 2013. Unfortunately, after 6 years, the battery life is now really suffering, and it's starting to feel a little sluggish. Up until the last 6 - 12 months it's been a great phone though.

An SE would be good for you if you can find a used one for a good price. It has the guts of the 6s in the body of the 5s so it should last you a few more years at least

I was surprised to discover recently that you can still buy a new (not reconditioned) iPhone SE direct from Apple but the link to them is on the refurbished part of the site.

All I'm seeing here: https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/iphone is X's. Did you find the SE somewhere else on the site?

FWIW. Newer 5" screens have had their bezels shrunk down so some are as small as a typical 4.7" phone.

The Pixel 3a has teeny tiny bezels, and now my fingers accidentally activate stuff at the screen edges while I'm holding it. This is progress, I guess.

The Pixel 2 is almost perfect, and I have no real problems with it, although I'm not sure if I'll ever stop missing my beloved Nexus 5X. That phone was perfect in every way, except for some fatal flaw that randomly killed it. It was made from durable plastics and light enough that it didn't easily damage itself when dropped. All the current thin, dense phones made of painted metal will show permanent scars from almost any physical interaction with another solid surface.

Then you'll _really_ love the Galaxy S9 with the curved edges, where the natural resting spot for your fingers is on the curved edges of the actual screen.

There is excellent touch rejection on the edges when the contact patch originates from the edge. You can even customize touch rejection with a good lock plugin.

It doesn't work when you're using a case. I regret buying Samsung.

The Nexus 5 is an amazing phone around that size, although the newest AOSP that they'll run is Hammerhead and it's EOL as far as official security updates go.

> There are no decent small (<5") phones on the market,

True.

> and haven't been for half a decade.

The iPhone SE is less than 5 years old, and it's terrific. I've had mine for nearly three years and I just got the battery replaced. I'm not sure I'd buy an SE new today if I needed a new phone, but I'm going to hold onto it until it dies or another good small phone comes out.

I have an SE as well, but the camera is a potato, roughly on par with $200 Android phones from 3 years ago. Ok outside with good lighting, but a muddy mess everywhere else.

I also find typing on it to be much more inaccurate than larger phones (even with swipe typing).

The battery life and everything else is great, though.

I just bought a "new" SE refurbished for $100. It's still fantastic and runs iOS 13 marvelously. It's really your only option for a small device that runs a modern phone OS.

I would love a 6" screen if it had any breadth. My Samsung Note 3 just had a hardware failure forcing me to "upgrade". Even though the Note 10 has a 6.3 inch screen instead of the Note 3's 5.7 inch screen, the Note 10's screen is _narrower_ due to the change from an 16:9 aspect ratio to 19:9.

My search for a _wide_ phone led me to develop this: https://github.com/dotancohen/screensize/

I've run it across every phone on the market and no phone is available that has a screen as wide as the Note 3 had six years ago. But phone _height_ has increased over 30% on average.

Being smaller has its accessibility benefits as well for those with smaller hands(palms).

My thoughts exactly. I've been thinking about going back to a flip phone and using on of these pocket computers or a tablet for my computing. Sometimes I have my phone for the sole reason of needing to be available for family or work. Sometimes I have my phone because I want to read or kill time. I like to think if I split these devices up, I could free up some pocket space and disconnect a little more. I've already closed down all my social media except for my pseudonymous twitter account. Even that has been up for the chopping block with all this impeach pit chatter.

There's one other consideration: with a flip phone, the screen can be protected by a hard surface where scratches don't affect usage.

If they have an Apple-class thumbprint / face scanner with basically unnoticeable delay, the slight delay for flipping it open might be a reasonable tradeoff for the huge durability improvements for active people and there could be some nice mitigation techniques such as their small display for anyone who doesn't want to flip it open to see if they have a message.

How much damage occurs when the phone is in use and thus open? And how much durability does the screen itself lose to become foldable?

> the screen can be protected by a hard surface where scratches don't affect usage.

I think this argument is really grasping as straws.

How critical is longevity of screen, during the life span of a smart phone? Sure it gets damaged, here and there. No where near approaching a problem, where the market dictates a hard cover over the screen.

Considering the number of people I see using smartphones with cracked screens I'd say it's a problem worth engineering to prevent.

Depends both on what you do for a living and how you treat electronics. Some people don't use screen protectors, others have a screen cracked so bad they have a hard time reading from it.

People are using phones for longer than they used to and at least anecdotally screen cracks are a popular reason for finally upgrading. If I walk around the city it also seems to be a popular service based on the number of shops using their advertisement space for it.

The screen is well-protected while closed, but more susceptible to scratches while open, because they haven't figured out how to make the hardened glass that covers regular smartphones foldable. At least I remember reading that about the Galaxy Fold. Maybe they've solved the problem in the Motorola device.

I wonder how it will hold up over time with dust, dirt, or sand getting pressed in between the screens over an over.

Yeah, it's a really interesting engineering trade-off: I know multiple other parents who cracked a screen playing with their kids so you'd hope to avoid that but not get more damage from dirt, etc. I just hope that whoever is working on this has enough resources to test it thoroughly rather than getting hammered in the news post-launch.

I've been using the Gemini PDA for the past year; it's recently been replaced by the Cosmo Communicator. It has a normal glass screen that folds like a mini laptop to reveal a keyboard. Mostly I like the keyboard (I'm typing on it now) because I find it hard to get over 60 WPM on a smartphone. However it's also nice to have the screen protected.

Theres a much cheaper flip option. A case with a flap cover

>It was easier to flip open a phone to unlock it then press the weird key combos that some phones used.

That depends if you had a lock code - in such case it was irrelevant back then already. Also it wasn't like you'd check the phone hundreds of time per day as most of the people do nowadays so it wasn't a big annoyance to unlock by pressing e.g. two keys in the keypad, but maybe that's just me.

One thing that many people appreciate as well was receiving a call and just open the phone to answer it.

Nobody had a lock code on the old Razr. What would you be locking? The ability to place a call?

Your text message history was rather private

Text messaging was available in the razr era but not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Relatively few people used it, and you were limited to sending and receiving small amounts of text only or maybe a very low res image (remember what early camera phones were like?) so those limited uses were also less likely to contain any sensitive data.

Texting was extremely common for my social circles at the time.

T9 was quite well used throughout the world during that era. Predictive spelling originated with Nokia. Just a few quick taps could spell out an entire sentence.

It was less well used in the US where you were charged a relatively exorbitant rate for sending and receiving texts. $.05/SMS + $.25/MMS

I'm in my 30s. When I was 15, texting in the razr era was just as ubiquitous in my school as it is for anyone right now. Sexting, gossip, flirting, hanging out, all of it, all day, everyone. My sisters could even touch-type entire essays to their friends under the dinner table while they ate and were not allowed on their phone.

There wasn't any image content, but you certainly don't need images to have messages you want to keep private.

I wouldn't want anyone I know going through any of my private conversations line by line. I don't see how razr 2004 vs iphone 2019 is any different in that regard.

>Text messaging was available in the razr era but not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Relatively few people used it

This isn't at all true in my experience, perhaps it's an age/generational thing? Personally, everyone that I know that texts today texted just as much back when they had flip phones like the razr

What kind of era are you talking about? Early to mid 90s? I'd agree. But after, for me anyway, around '98 texting was absolutely ubiquitous and it was absolutely the primary method of communication between everyone I know.

And calls can be quite expensive/valuable - I seem to recall some rumour of stolen mobile phones being used to call premium rate numbers and cash in (don't know how true it ever was)

The lock code also prevented pocket dialing, although with a flip phone this wasn’t much of an issue.

And yeah as others have said, it protected your texts and pictures. The razr already had a camera.

> One thing that many people appreciate as well was receiving a call and just open the phone to answer it.

What's a "call" and why would I receive one on my phone?

I am interested in them from the savings in overall length which is the largest dimension. the side effect of folding of course being it may be come too thick.

however I am still in the camp of hoping we have reached peak phone size and instead will see more offerings along the sizes of early smart phones.

I think this phone has two main appeals. One is the smaller form factor, and the second is the nostalgia for those who owned a Razr back when it was the big hit item.

I knew people who worked as servers who liked these styles of phones because they could text (with any type of prediction turned off of course) while the phone was opened in their pocket .. between doing rounds of their open tables.

Wow, I haven't thought of this usecase before. Sweet that with keypad phones you could use your muscle memory to text without looking at the screen.

My LG Stylo has this super annoying wake feature that works when you either shake the phone, or touch the screen a lot. It keeps turning on in my pocket just because of movement and sometime certain textiles allow my leg to even swipe the lock screen and press random stuff. Having a hardware button is better, but not perfect as depending on where it is, you could be accidentally pressing it when it's tumbling around in a backpack etc. Really the best solution to unintentionally waking your phone (at least for me) would be a flip phone.

Flip buttons could have instantaneous fingerprint readers.

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