[dklsafhjskljfl]

The upcoming sony xz4 compact may be the only small phone with premium components, and it's extremely frustrating. It's not even /that/ small.

You can find small phones but they have terrible cameras, sub HD resolutions, and bargain basement SOCs.

Is the demand for a premium (or even mid range) small phone really that low?

[twblalock]

Yes, the demand really is that low. People who want a smaller phone in 2019 are a very small yet very vocal minority.

If there was a large untapped market for smaller phones, then the limited number of small phones on the market would be selling a lot better than they actually are. Somebody would notice and start making more of them.

Like phones with physical keyboards, phones with small screens have become a niche product and they will probably disappear in the next few years.

[thedays]

> Yes, the demand really is that low.

Do you have any evidence for that?

There are virtually no, modern, reasonably-specced and reasonably priced phones with smaller screens available currently, so it's no wonder they're not selling.

In the Android world, there's only a couple of low-end Nokia phones (Nokia 1 - 4.5" screen and Nokia 3 - 5.2" screen), low-end Samsungs like the Galaxy J3 and the high-end and expensive Sony XZ2 Compact available but these phones aren't available for sale in many shops or on many contracts. If the market doesn't produce modern smaller phones, then they can't be sold, so arguing that "the demand really is that low" is currently a circular argument.

I suspect that part of the reason why the resale value of older iPhones like the 6 and 6s are high is that a reasonable percentage of people, esp. women, want smaller phones like these iPhones which are still reasonably fast and quite usable. My girlfriend hates using large phones as she finds them too big to hold in one hand easily, and has kept using an old Android because of its 4.5" screen.

I'm a tall person - well over 6 foot - with largish hands and even I find it difficult to comfortably use a phone wider than 70mm. I also find the current trend of producing 18:9 ratio phones completely baffling, as it makes reaching the top of the screen impossible with one hand in situations like traveling on trains or buses. Widescreen videos are filmed in 16:9 ratio, so it would make much more sense to go back to 16:9 ratio phone screens.

[twblalock]

> There are virtually no, modern, reasonably-specced and reasonably priced phones with smaller screens available currently, so it's no wonder they're not selling.

They don't exist because phone companies know that the demand is too low to justify the investment.

If you want to convince people that the demand is there, you'll need to explain why every phone manufacturer has come to the opposite conclusion. Not a single one is making small high end phones. Is every manufacturer blind to market demand and/or stupid?

[thedays]

> Not a single one is making small high end phones.

This is not quite true - Sony still is producing the high-end XZ2 Compact with the Snapdragon 845 and 4GB RAM - https://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/phones/xperia-xz2-com...

Sony is the only manufacturer I'm aware of that is still producing smallish phones. It is rumoured to be replacing this phone with the XZ4 Compact, but Sony is not particularly good at marketing or distributing its phones.

> Is every manufacturer blind to market demand and/or stupid?

Quite possibly. Mobile phone manufacturers seem to slavishly copy each other and copy Apple especially, as can be seen with the recent stupid copying of the removal of headphone jacks and the use of notches in many phones after Apple made these changes in its iPhones. Was the market demanding these changes? I doubt it. Were these changes necessary? No.

If everyone wants phones with larger screens, why are so many consumers holding off on upgrading their iPhone? Apple recently blamed its battery upgrade program for a $9 billion loss in revenue, but its very possible that a reasonable percentage of the users of these older iPhones simply don't the larger-screened and more expensive iPhones currently on offer.

> you'll need to explain why every phone manufacturer has come to the opposite conclusion

I suspect that manufacturers are making phones with larger screens as many consumers in what were faster-growing smartphone markets such as China and India preferred phones with larger screens so they could have a single 'smart' device, rather than buy a phone and a tablet as many consumers in developed economy markets did.

I suspect also that the lack of diversity amongst smartphone product managers and engineering staff is also having an important influence on these changes. Men are physically larger than women on average, and are over-represented in the staff of smartphone manufacturing companies. More women, older and disabled people in their staff would likely help to produce devices that suit the needs of a wider range of people, and not just young men with high levels of physical dexterity, good eyesight and higher than average interest in 'working out' how to use overly complicated smartphone interfaces.

I hope that mobile phone manufacturers can regain their ability to segment the market and produce a wider range of devices and form factors like they did until a couple of years ago. Innovation in the smartphone space has slowed dramatically, and it's no wonder that smartphone sales have also slowed.

[Wowfunhappy]

The XZ2 Compact has no headphone jack. :(

[jbay808]

The XZ1 Compact does! I love this phone. It has everything I want. SD card slot, headphone jack, water resistance, small, good camera and insane battery life.

The only problem with it was how hard it was to find anywhere. Agree with the comment that Sony is bad at promoting or offering their phones.

[mdorazio]

In 2016, 4 inch Apple phones accounted for only 16% of total iPhone sales (see bottom of [1]). The market clearly shifted to favor bigger screens. Personally, I love the SE form factor and will only begrudgingly get a bigger phone when this one dies, but every time someone sees it they inevitably comment to the effect of "why is your phone so small?" The general market expectation is now that bigger = better, unfortunately.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-se-review-retro...

[theli0nheart]

This is a little misleading. The last “flagship” 4 inch iPhone was released in 2013 (iPhone 5), so it makes sense that 3 years later that they would only account for a minority of devices sold.

[scarface74]

And that would still be over 35 million phones -or 10 times more phones than Google sells in a year.

[h1d]

That's just about the time people started to try the bigger screen for the first time. If the ratio goes side ways or lower, it means people aren't as interested.

[kbrackbill]

Do you have any insight as to why?

I'm part of that minority and small phones seem better in so many ways. My hands are relatively big I think, but even with "small" phones now I can barely use them with one hand. The smaller screen uses less battery. Larger phones don't fit in pockets very well and result in a spot that wears through on my jeans where the corner of the phone pokes out from my pocket.

I'm really struggling to think of advantages to larger phones. I guess if you always carry around a purse/bag then the size doesn't matter as much, and if you had smaller hands then maybe one-handed use is just impossible regardless of the size. But what's the use case? It's not like a real computer where a larger screen means you can multitask better, since you can barely multitask anyway.

[somebodythere]

Larger phone also means you can fit a larger battery inside. In fact, in many cases the battery size/power consumption ratio can be improved.

Also people are spending a larger amount of their time on their phones watching video. A larger screen is an improved experience for watching video.

[jdietrich]

There has been a drastic increase in how much people use their phones. according to a 2017 study by comScore, the average American adult spends 2 hours and 51 minutes per day using their phone. Other research has returned even higher numbers; a large proportion of people spend more than a quarter of their waking hours looking at their phone.

Given such heavy use, it makes sense to use the biggest practical screen. There's a reason why books aren't the size of an index card. Screen sizes in the west have historically lagged behind middle-income markets, where smartphones leapfrogged laptops as the primary computing device for most users. Indian and Chinese customers were demanding 6" 'phablets' at a time when most manufacturers were ambivalent about breaking the 5" barrier. A 6" device is roughly the upper limit for average female hands and average trouser pockets, making it a natural point of convergence.

An iPhone SE has a screen area of 44.1cm². A phone with a 6" 16:9 display has a screen area of 99.2cm². That's still tiny compared to a paperback book (~195.8cm²), but it's pretty much the sweet spot.

https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-thei...

[raydev]

> The smaller screen uses less battery

I just upgraded to the XS Max and it lasts far longer than my 5S, 6S, and 7 before it. It's even in Apple's support docs, the bigger phones have better battery life.

> I'm really struggling to think of advantages to larger phones

For me, it's all about reading. Most weekends I'm taking my kid to events that don't require my full attention. As I started using my phone for reading more, I found I was getting frustrated with the cramped space, constantly scrolling.

So this year I went all out and got the XS Max, and I gotta say: I couldn't be happier. Less scrolling, I make far fewer typing mistakes with the bigger phone, I'm not scrambling to charge my phone at 5pm.

Sure, I had to give up typing one-handed as my thumb cannot reach the opposite side of the keyboard. That's fine.

[linuxftw]

Clothing should have a certain amount of utility, IMO. Perhaps it's the jeans that need to be updated.

I'm pretty happy with the size of my phone currently, not sure it qualifies as small or large. Largest phone I had was for work, Iphone 6+, that thing was unwieldy, essentially a tablet. I wouldn't own one that big personally.

[Kaibeezy]

Cargo pants, right? The modern variant is called “tactical”, and can be found with flat sides rather than bulky pouches. In a dark color the pockets are almost invisible.

Vertx Legacy are my favorite. The thigh pocket has an inner magazine pocket that holds a phone perfectly. Or a backup battery. If you carry two phones, it keeps them from clunking into each other.

https://vertx.com/mens-legacy-pants

[linuxftw]

flat side cargo pants, that's pretty neat, I hadn't seen those.

[stedaniels]

You can't just keep making bigger pockets... Your legs and hips bend in ways that a phone can't.

[kalleboo]

Time to go back to the days when I had my Palm IIIx in a pouch on my belt http://www.militaryuniformsupply.com/files/products/p/pda-po...

[izacus]

> Yes, the demand really is that low. People who want a smaller phone in 2019 are a very small yet very vocal minority.

What are you basing that on?

[ceejayoz]

Manufacturers not making/pushing them is a pretty good sign they're not super popular.

[adamwathan]

Hmm don't think I buy this, at least in Apple's case.

They have a monopoly on the operating system, which is what people really want with both the iPhone and the Mac.

People will still spend $3000 on a 15" MacBook Pro that they hate (because of the ridiculous touchbar) because it's the only high spec'd laptop available with macOS.

There's no way for consumers to tell Apple "we prefer no touchbar" purely with sales data because they aren't given the choice.

I think that same factor is huge with the iPhone. I have bought multiple 4.7" iPhones now, all of which I hate because of the size, but it is the smallest (correction: smallest premium) phone Apple makes/made. So looking at the data, it looks like I love the new iPhone size because I bought it, but the reality is I had no choice if I wanted to keep using iOS and didn't want to deal with a horrible experience performance-wise from aging hardware.

[ceejayoz]

Apple's a special case, but we're not seeing the various Android vendors (nor the cellular carriers) giving any appreciable retail space to small devices either.

They're largely relegated to Walmart's "I need a cheap burner phone" prepaid phone department.

[Jtsummers]

That’s a sign, but there are confounders.

If I market a new device that’s larger and give it better specs how can the smaller device survive? Its only feature is its size but its specs are always behind and getting further behind. The consumers will drift from it as the spec disparity increases.

From a business standpoint it seems bigger is better, but it’s the better display/storage/battery/camera that’s driving the consumer not the size.

[frabbit]

The Unihertz Jelly and Atom kickstarters were pretty succesful. I have only used the Jelly, but its fine for a low end small phone that can display webpages/maps when necessary.

If it had better battery life I would not want anything else. But I do not play games / read or browse on my phone. I just want GPS/maps text and calls.

[delhanty]

>People who want a smaller phone in 2019 are a very small yet very vocal minority.

Really?

Here in Japan, there are a lot of ladies with small hands, not particularly vocal on HN, and they seem to find small phones more comfortable to hold.

[hocuspocus]

Go to Korea or China and you'll see there's no particular correlation between hand and phone sizes. It's mostly cultural.

North-America, Europe and Japan are over-saturated. Markets that are still growing drive the demand for bigger phones, it's really as simple as that.

[delhanty]

Korea and China - not spent long in either, but can quite believe that larger phones would play better culturally in those countries than in Japan.

Japan - small does generally play very well here - think back to how small some of the Toshiba Libretto notebooks were.

A high-quality, small phone; easy to hold; easy to store in a small designer bag - once the novelty factor of a bigger phone has worn off - it's hard to understand why that's such a niche play.

Only Apple, Google, Samsung etc. have authoritative data. But from Apple's point of view, cancelling the iPhone SE would have simplified their supply chain, which would have been an easy sell to Tim Cook as he's an operations guy.

That doesn't mean that we'll never see another small phone from Apple again.

[Theodores]

I think you are confusing people that want a small phone with people that want a premium small phone.

If you go with the small phone concept then your life might not revolve around your 'hand rectangle'. You also might have bought your phone ages ago and be in no hurry to upgrade.

A lot of the older folk are okay with the relatively basic phones they bought five years ago. So long as the camera is good enough for messages to close family members and the phone works for voice calls then there is no problem. These phones did have smaller screens and, for this demographic, there is no perceived point in upgrading to the expensive, fragile giant hand rectangle. Consequently they are not a vocal crowd. All slowness is them fumbling around or connection speed, the latest and greatest CPU is not important and the screen is adequate for their eyesight.

I run a basic small screen phone myself and I am toying with spending the £3.29 to get the cracked screen replaced. I could get a better phone but I would be looking at something equally small and underpowered as what I currently own, something that wouldn't even be considered a phone by most people here. 4.5" screen with plastic back and replaceable battery, with SD card slot. It will cost a tenth of the price of a premium hand-rectangle and I will probably own it for much longer than how long a premium phone is owned for.

So yes there is 'low demand' but lots of it. This demand is met by products that don't even appear on the radar of the HN crowd as 'viable'.

[ianai]

Apple sold some of their best numbers when they released the SE.

[roenxi]

You might be right, but as far as I can see the SE is half the price of the next cheapest iPhone, the 7.

There is going to be a market for people who want a phone that is not $500 American dollars, and it is wise of Apple to cater too it.

[linuxftw]

> Like phones with physical keyboards

I disagree with this point. I think other manufactures simply realized it's cheaper to not include a keyboard, and since no one else is anyway, easy enough to get away with it.

[drb91]

How on earth do people measure demand if the market doesn’t supply?

[dzhiurgis]

> Yes, the demand really is that low.

As a person with bigger hands I always wonder is the demand for larger mice is really that low?

[justtopost]

Plenty of large mice available, I am partial to vertical mice for long periods of work.

[dzhiurgis]

Is it really?

Go to Logitech and tell me which hand sizes suit which. Can I get larger or smaller size of the particular model I want?

I remember reading years ago some mechanic getting humongous mice from a novelty/joke shop...

[spiritcat]

how about a foldable small phone?

[twblalock]

We’ll see if anybody can make one that doesn’t have a compromised user experience.

Even so, people who like small phones would complain that the screen is too big to use one-handed when the thing is unfolded.

[huebnerob]

Small phone equals small battery, and when you have a reduced power budget there's some things you just can't do. Small phone also obviously equals small hardware components. To the extent that components occupy physical space on a logic board, there's going to need to be a trade-off there.

People say they 'just' want a 4" modern phone, but they define it as a phone with multiple cameras, high storage capacity, and fast processors, etc. etc.. It's a nontrivial engineering challenge to get everything into a smaller package, and this at a time where the market at large has picked bigger phones as the winner.

Also, don't forget that people generally expect something that's smaller to be cheaper. Reality is, it might actually cost more money to deliver a smaller product, and at that point you're swimming against people's assumptions, not a great place to be.

So, you sit down to design a small modern phone and BAM it's just nothing but obstacles in every direction. It doesn't surprise me that the conclusion manufacturers are making is that the only winning move is not to play.

I'm not saying it's the _right_ decision necessarily, maybe someone will make an excellent small phone in the near future and the whole world will flock to it. But nothing has pushed the industry in that direction yet.

[bscphil]

>People say they 'just' want a 4" modern phone, but they define it as a phone with multiple cameras, high storage capacity, and fast processors, etc. etc.. It's a nontrivial engineering challenge to get everything into a smaller package, and this at a time where the market at large has picked bigger phones as the winner.

I don't know. My Nexus 4 was fine with respect to all of these things when it came out. Not top of the line power, of course, but not shabby either. Surely our ability to get faster processors into the same package has significantly increased since then. If I could get the exact form factor of a Nexus 4 with any hardware improvements available since it came out over 6 years ago, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat.

[Wowfunhappy]

My Nexus 4 is about the same size as my iPhone 6S. I just dug the Nexus out of my drawer to check. They're equally wide, and while the iPhone is slightly taller, it's a very minor difference.

My Nexus 4 also had pretty big battery issues, and that was despite having no LTE support.

[coryfklein]

The iPhone SE is one giant counter example to everything you just said.

[Geee]

It can be made thicker.

[daurnimator]

I heard the XZ4 compact was cancelled. https://www.androidpit.com/sony-cancels-xperia-compacts

[Youden]

That seems like typical media hysteria to get views. Per a much more reasonable article (https://www.xda-developers.com/sony-xperia-xz4-compact-cance...), the entirety of available evidence is this statement given during an interview:

"We stuck with Compact for a very long time, because of the ease of use. There’s always room for different sizes, but people want a lot more surface area for their content now."

That doesn't sound like a definite statement to me. A more appropriate headline would be "Future of Sony Compact series in question" or something along those lines. That just wouldn't sound as exciting though.

[xtrimsky1234]

I don't think small phone demand is low.

I think it's just harder to make a small phone very good and premium, and keep the price low.

Concerning the Sony, I personally got the Sony X3 Compact, I was quite disappointed with the Camera. All the Sony smartphones boast great cameras, but when you use it, the UX is bad. Shutter speed is slow, interface is bad. Also like you said, it's not that small. The Google Pixel 3 is only 0.07 inch wider, I think it's a much better choice (camera much better, stock android etc...)