Jelly 2, World's Smallest Android 10 4G Smartphone | Hacker News Reader

Jelly 2, World's Smallest Android 10 4G Smartphone

kickstarter.com

The volume of the Unihertz Jelly 2 (77.4cm³) is more than 13% larger than the volume of an Apple iPhone SE (2020) (68cm³)!

I consider that to be a good reminder that there is no free lunch: If you build such a small smartphone, you suddenly don't have enough space behind the screen for a flat battery anymore, forcing you to increase the depth of the device to fit an adequate battery. You then end up with a device with a similar volume as one with a larger screen.

it still makes a difference, i struggle to use my current phone one-handed. reaching the other edge with my thumb is always a pain. i welcome a smaller but thicker phone.

I get hate every time I demonstrate mine, especially from males, but something like a pop socket really makes handling a phone a much nicer experience.

You're not wrong, but I'd still rather see phones that aren't thin slabs fully touch sensitive ob one side. This design is but no means ergonomic. I'd kill for a Blackberry again. The Q5/Q10 really hit the sweet spot for me.

How do you not snap the phone with one of those on it?

I don't understand the question. The pop socket doesn't apply any force. I suppose if you sit on the phone it could bend easier. I do not do this.

That’s fine with me.

The iPhone SE was a good size but had terrible battery life from day one.

I’m now using an iPhone 7, and it too has terrible battery life, with the added benefit that if I take it out of its case I cannot hold on to it for a sustained period because it’s so thin and has no real edges to speak of, just large diameter radii.

Are you using the 2020 SE or the older one?

The older one. Was using.

I read the 2020 SE is the same size as the 7, so meh that makes it completely uninteresting.

From my experience with xperia mini the added thickness made it much more comfortable to hold and use.

If Sony ever brings back Xperia Mini I will be a happy man.

I don't want the best camera or the fastest cpu. Can live with a tiny display. Just give me something that can run Android 10 reasonably well in a tiny package and you have my money.

Oh, I loved the X10 Mini. Especially the one with the little slide-out keyboard. I typed better on that than I do on my much larger iPhone.

I had the X10 Mini Pro. The slide out keyboard was absolutely amazing for emulation + doing sysadmin tasks. The only alternative these days is the F(x)tec Pro [1], but it's quite expensive :(

[1]: https://store.fxtec.com/product/fxtec-pro1/

Do you mean the Xperia Compact, or did they have a separate Mini line too?

I love Sony's phones, but their product naming confuses me to no end...

I 100% agree with you. Their latest flagship is named "1 II" (that's Xperia one, mark two. Someone should be fired for this).

Anyway, I was thinking of the original mini line not the later compact line. The first mini, "x10 mini", was too small to run the standard Android launcher so I would prefer the newer slightly larger "mini":

https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-SE-2020,...

The Compact models are newer, the Mini line was popular when they were called Sony-Ericsson. Though I agree with the naming scheme issues, my first smartphone was a Xperia X10 Mini Pro[1], which was quite a mouthful.

[1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x10_mini_pro-3...

I missed this which irritates me: I have the first Jelly and would definitely like a larger battery and better GPS. May still order one later anyway.

I love the size and convenience. I find the keyboard surprisingly good for such a small screen. For my purposes: occasional call, signal message, GPS/GoogleMaps it is perfect.

Great! This seems to compete with the new palm.com phones, but the palm ones have poor battery life (palm do look nicer though).

I'd be happy to drop money for a phone this size provided it can last all day. The whole point of a small phone is not to think about it - including having to charge it halfway through your day.

Recent HN thread Palm – The best small phone for minimalists, athletes, and kids [1]. The phone was released in late 2018 by a Chinese manufacturer known for releasing malware [2] in the past:

> The app, named "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar," was developed by TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company that among other things owns the Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm brands.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659871

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-preinstalled-on-...

I was eager to buy this and even had the kickstarter on my calendar and checked it first thing this morning after waking up (PST). Unfortunately $129 was really the limit of what I was willing to pay and they're out of that tier of pricing. I cannot imagine this retailing at $200 and doing well. I guess I'll pickup a used one in a year when someone gets bored with it.

I have the first one and it's great for the gym or running. However removing the rear backing and battery to swap my phone's sim card into is a pain (so that I don't have to pay for two phone plans when I only use this one a few hours a week), as is the micro USB charging and the lack of fingerprint reader and the smaller battery.

Agreed on the SIM swapping being irritating. It would be nice if it were in some sort of caddy. I also have a spare battery and find it irritating to swap it out.

A phone like this would be absolutely perfect in my world. Not as a daily phone or a phone at all but rather a bicycle computer with extended features. Shoving a 5-6-7 inch screen on the handlebar is borderline impossible and and anything but optimal. But something like this could be perfect: exercise tracking, music player, with some additional work you could hook it up to a camera mounted under the seat and have a mirror, which I find extremely useful. Ideally one or two buttons mounted somewhere around the shifters to easily switch between some pre-defined modes(tracking, camera, map, weather, etc.) and it could be absolutely perfect.

I would caution against mounting phones on handlebars. I used an iPhone for a few months, and then I noticed my camera would constantly jitter - constant shaking and bumping damaged the camera’s autofocus.

Using them once in a while is probably ok, but I think the internal electronics of a phone are not rated or tested for such constant “abuse”

And here I am shoving a 6 inch screen on my handlebars, because I'd crash if I had to wear my reading glasses while riding. Take my advice and don't get old.

Which extended features you need to have on the bicycle computer, for example? I'm already overwhelmed with features my bicomp has. (I use SC Dash M50, because I like it small pebble like size).

Generally what I said above: map, strava, camera mounted under the seat as a mirror(all mirrors I've seen take a lot of space on the handlebars), music player, notifications, calls and whatnot. I don't ride a bike every day(usually it's twice a week) but my rides are in the 60-80km range so having the basics in front of me would be absolutely perfect. At the moment every time I want to check a notification or pause strava or change my playlist, I have to pull over, take my phone out of my backpack, do my thing, put the phone back in and then continue riding. It's not a big deal by any means but it is annoying when you have to stop once every hour or so.

Map - I have map on my bicomp.

Strava - I can upload my route to Strava from phone connected by BLE.

Mirror - yeah, it will be nice to have. Currently, I use my ears for tracking cars behind me, which saved me lot of times. I had moped mirror mounted on handlebars for about month: it was good, but I broke it very fast. Also, I had tiny mirror on pole/stick?(non native speaker) manually soldered to left side of my glasses with metal frame: it worked good, but I look dumb when I wear them, and they were hard to store, so mirror was scratched and damaged in few days. I plan to make new version, using flex leg from another glasses with metal frame, so I will be able to fold mirror.

Music player - I use cheap Chinese open-ear headphones(Atlanfa, cannot find them online) with built-in player and FM radio. I use them almost every day. They are open ear, so I hear road very well, especially with reduced volume. They work for about 2h with FM radio on, which is enough for me.

Notifications - my bicomp can display notifications and call info from phone attached by BLE, and my headphones are alerting me too about notifications and allows me to respond to calls. However, I have problem on my bicomp (Dash M50) with notifications with emoj: they are truncated after first emoj. Sometimes, emoj is the first letter in the text. :-(

I ride for about 25km daily to/from work in hilly area.

It looks like a downsized version of the Motorola Defy which I'm still using on and off. It has the same screen resolution on a smaller screen (the Defy has a 3.7" screen). The selling point for the Defy was the fact that is was waterproof and relatively sturdy (which is proven by the fact that I haven't managed to break it in 9 years of rough use), I'm still waiting for a similar but more up to date device to appear. There is no information on whether this device is waterproof, this question is asked in the FAQ but not answered.

Anyone here ever get one of their older devices?

I had the original Jelly. Had high hopes of getting a small modern phone, with minimal features but no time wasting apps, but returned it.

Battery life was hours. It wasn’t safe to take to work because it’d be dead in an hour of listening to music on the commute.

Phone call quality was so poor my family and coworkers went mutiny. I could hear them fine but the mic was awful, apparently.

The screen was so, so small that it took a long time to type, and was fraught with mistakes. I realized there is such a thing as too small.

Every picture taken was uselessly blurry.

Overall it felt like the early 2000s.

I would greatly be willing to try again. I need to upgrade this iPhone SE. Call me crazy, but having a phone that fits in my pocket, no matter what I’m wearing - that’s the best feature a phone could have.

listening to audio should not drain your battery. i get an hour of audio even if my battery is down to 10%. it hardly takes more energy than what the phone consumes when idle.

if audio drains the battery then there is a serious design flaw

You might be in luck later this year — rumor is that the smallest model of “iPhone 12” will be almost the same case size as the classic SE.

Rumor is that Apple starts fake rumors so they can always surprise everyone. Actually, that rumor is completely made up just like every other rumor.

Feel like I have been hearing those rumors for years.

I did, and liked it.

https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/jelly

I use a Sony XZ1C now, though. The battery lifetime of the Jelly was a problem when I was travelling, and at 52 years I need a bit larger fonts. I wonder whether to get this one, though... Unihertz rocks, the phone supports the android upgrade stuff (DSU), the battery might just be big enough for me, AND: I loved the way the Jelly just wasn't a timewaste magnet. It let me run apps, very functional.

Actually I have the Jelly Pro and am taking it almost every time with me while doing sports wrapped around my upper arm. It is lightweight and I can have and use (almost) any android app on it. It is just nice to have a tiny device for playing music from Google Play Music/ YouTube Music and to have GPS tracking in that format. But I can only recommend it as a second or third device... for browsing, navigating or texting the display is too small and the apps are not optimized for that format.

I had the Atom - cheap phone not even powerful enough to show a heavily javascripted page; it was just about usable, but definitely needs patience and very good eyesight.

Their bundled software is quite glitchy but what I could not forgive, is that they don't provide the source code, which I heard was some kind of a GPL violation but they don't care.

I used it for about 3 or 4 months and then the new SE came out.

Served it's purpose, but looking back, using it feels like it was some sort of penance.

I have the original Jelly and use it a lot when I travel back to my home country, so I don't have to change SIMs. VERY liberating to suddenly not having to carry a larger device. Not much app-use for me though: phone calls, Signal, SMS and an occasional Google search or map.

The kickstarter funding target is $50k. Is that a typical cost to design and manufacture a phone?

A good budget for having a folding table at Mobile World Congress and giving out Jelly 2 branded socks.

Can you make one that's just not RSI inducingly large? I don't need "oh it's so cute" at parties, I need, "that looks almost usable."

I'm so close to just buying a second hand Nexus 5, i'm so over all these phablets.

Seems great for the prison phone market! Even though it is on the larger side and will be quite uncomfortable to fit. There is are while (mostly Chinese) lines of phones made for smuggling [1]. Seems like a stretch that it has a lot of appeal outside of that market.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zngpz4/prison-phones-that...

This isn't a prison phone — prison phones need to charge quickly and run for days on one charge.

This is for people who want to fit the phone in a pocket, and don't want to use it often. The kind of person who needs to have google authenticator available, and wants to never ever spend time browsing instagram. A sort of person I want to be ;)

According to the linked page, the Jelly 2 is 95mm * 50mm * 17mm.

The Palm phone is 97mm * 51mm * 7mm, so it's smaller (particularly a lot thinner) than the Jelly 2.

Still, it's wonderful to see more options in the pocket-sized phones!! A vastly under-served market.

I bought the Palm phone after it was discussed here a month or so back. Very happy with it, actually fits in my pocket and I can't feel it's there.

With StockROM it would be interesting. The first Jelly doesn't seem to get updates anymore.

Wow...100% funded in 175 seconds

Yeah, I was a few minutes early and missed the $129, then the $139, and ended up just getting the $159 option.

Pro tip. Have your credit card info saved in your kickstarter account so you don't end up like me.

And still virtually every single phone released in the past 3 years is bigger than say 140x68cm, which is about the maximum you could call a "small" phone.

I bit almost instantly. I've been waiting for something that looked promising in the small phone arena for years, this is the first one I've felt comfortable trying. I assumed it wasn't going to have a headphone jack, but it does!

This is just "BEST SELLER 3.5 INCH ULTRA SMALL CELL PHONE SLIM ANDROID OEM CHINA UNLOCKED 4G DUAL SIM" on Alibaba with a fingerprint reader and better camera.

The same as every single other Jelly product.

I'll never understand kickstarter.

edit: you're probably able to find the exact model of phone they're rebadging if you search for its oddball screen resolution, I just grabbed the name of the first miniphone that looked similar.

I don't think this is the case. It has a decent P60 SoC w/ 6GB of RAM and Android 10 support. None of the mini phones I could find on Alibaba were anywhere close in spec. Even the term you highlighted was for 3.5" screen, not 3.0" screen.

I imagine it's not hard to track down whomever makes the phone on Alibaba and pay them a few extra dollars to put in a few better chips. Then use Kickstarter magic to advertise it, and pocket the difference.

What's the actual evidence that they designed and made it, a screenshot of the CAD file in the video? They never actually claim they created it themselves and tested iterations etc like actual phone manufacturers do. Somehow they're more secretive than Apple?

Considering they already have "protypes" that are being reviewed, I think it lends credence to this possibility.

You're moving goal posts. I would say if they had to ask for a different SoC to be put in a smaller chassis, that is custom work, and has risk.

Supposedly they are a subsidiary of AGold Communication Co. Ltd. which claims to have manufacturing experience, though their website is sparse and they have really old phones on there.

Even if they didn't wholly design it, I don't think it's fair to claim they are marketing a cookie-cutter design you can easily obtain off Alibaba, since you can't.

This is a Shenzhen company, they probably know 100 different local smartphone OEMs and can order directly from them if they wish.

This reminds of my old HTC Magic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Magic

That's a chunky monkey!

Everyone is so concerned about privacy. Apple, Android, Google, etc. spend billions of $ and hundreds of people on managing privacy for their mobile devices, vetting apps, monitoring and hardening the hardware against hacking. Even then they don't get it totally right.

What are the chances some new small phone prototyper is going to do this properly to the point I trust it enough that the novelty of something smaller is more valuable than not getting hacked and monitored?

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