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Comment by drillsteps5 | Hacker News Reader

I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.

Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.

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> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.

And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.

PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.

> All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.

Agreed - going from the original SE to the mini meant a big downgrade in usability for me, as it's now hard to reach the top of the screen.

My assumption is that very few people who like Dom Joly sized phones use them one handed

I don't give a stuff about the vast majority of "apps". Webpages work fine.

Built in ones work fine - mail, safari, music, maps, photos

Major ones work fine - bbc sounds, slack+teams, whatsapp, various authenticator programs

We do, and it is a pain. It is incredibly easy to defeat any kind of design or in fact HID guidelines by cranking text size to the max on these smaller devices.

I would not go as far as calling the iPhone Minis "egregiously huge", keep in mind that screen size is not a great measure for phone sizes across different generations. You could easily fit a 4+ inch display into the form factor of the 4S with modern technology, the bezels on those phones were huge. Unless my math is off, the housing of the 4S has a diagonal of just over 5 inches.

Yep. Aiphor's BlueFox NX1 with 4 inch screen is roughly the same size as original iPhone, but has a larger screen (iPhone had bigger bezels and the home button underneath). To me it feels a bit too small for things like typing/texting for example.