[alwa]

Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.

By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…

[dotancohen]

I just googled Unihertz Atom and the AI section has this:

  > The Unihertz Atom's 2.45-inch screen (240x432 resolution) is "shockingly acceptable" for its niche.

Your comment shows as having been written four hours ago. I cannot help but draw conclusions.

[alwa]

Ha!! That may be the first time I've been cited in a search result! I'm flattered :)

Though of course Google's Gemini-whatever does manage to subtly miss the mark even there: I said (and think) that the typing experience is acceptable, I said nothing about the screen. If I remember correctly, the last one I handled, the screen was resistive rather than capacitive, and it felt weird and squishy. Still not bad for the price, and it's a minor miracle how much Android software can still draw a coherent layout with that kind of resolution, but...

[crossroadsguy]

They have a Jelly Max https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max and this looks too good to be true. I am sure one catch would be that it's not sold in my geography but still. Does it have at least few years of OS update support and more than few years of security updates?

[alwa]

My impression was that their update cadence is ~never and that the Jelly Max is rather closer to iPhone-SE-sized. The last one I handled was for ephemeral use on a trip abroad. It was durable, functional, and it worked wonders as far as breaking the phone-checking dopamine cycle.

I'd never come anywhere close to trusting it with anything important, but then again maybe that's not such a bad relationship to have to a smartphone...