Asus Zenfone 10

Yeah, that’s a normal sized phone.

Remember talking about All old using models with small hands to make the original iPhone look bigger? Nothing ever changes. Heh.

there used to be a time when choosing a phone depended on its intrinsic value. But nowadays, the value you get from your phone depends on external factors, such as the cloud provider, the synergy between the phone and the rest of your computer setup, and the overall support you get from the company. I think this is the part where all android manufacturers get wrong: they focus so much on the intrinsic value of the phone without working on its extrinsic value within an ecosystem.

For the record though, if you actually want a small phone, the Unihertz Jelly 2e came out recently, I've been tempted by that

Not sure why this one gets so much press as a compact phone.

This is large phone with none of those of things.

May not be comically humongous, but... Feels like we are just falling for the tag line? The 5.9" dimension is on the first scroll.

Plus other crazy things about the replacement cycle:

- Battery life (arguably) degrades faster than software support and yet the industry moved AWAY from replaceable baterries

- Software bloat makes hardware seem slower, where replacing a factory ROM with LineageOS or some other slimmer Android version can really feel like a hardware upgrade

- The e-waste, my word the e-waste! There's no cost to the manfacturer for any kind of lifecycle management of the (some very precious) resources used to create these devices (this is also true for pretty much every industry).

- The opposite of the "Microsoft Office feature" effect. The average consumer seems to need the latest trivial upgrade or new cool-but-actually-pointless function that manufacturers dream up as a differentiator. Remember when numerous iterations of Microsoft Office meant no actual usage difference to anyone but absolute power users. Times have changed, consumer culture is a tightening cycle. (not that I'm immune, and I have to consciously try quite hard to resist it).

- Counter to the point above: removal of general-purpose computing functions / use-cases. No SD card slot, no headphone jack. I used to have an Sony Ericsson that had a mini/micro HDMI port. Was able to output video to a TV with the appropriate cable. These devices are so capable of many things, but they're handcuffed and hamstrung by design.

My current phone is only 2.5 years old, custom ROM installed so it's on Android 13 and runs really well, and it's the battery life that's making it feel "old" (now that the custom ROM has solved the software old-ness issue).

That said, even when going by volume, this isn't a particularly small phone at 94 cm3.

A current-gen iPhone SE is only 68 cm3. The zenphone 10 sits in between the 81.8 cm3 iPhone 14 and the 99 cm3 iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Or compared to Samsung, the "regular sized" Galaxy S23 is 78.8 cm3. Even the S23+ is slightly smaller at 91 cm3! Only the S23 Ultra is significantly larger at 114 cm3.

(All volumes here were determined by multiplying the deminsions listed on GSM Arena. They're probably all slightly off due to camera bumps, but should be comparable to each other.)

& I agree, I'm still rocking a pixel 4 because I can't bring myself to buy a new phone (when there really hasn't been any note worth advancements in years), especially when the avg phone these days are just mini tablets IMO.

As of now I am waiting for the Nothing Phone 2 announcement to see what I get. But this Zenphone 10 is now a contender.