A page to gather interest in a small Android phone
A page to gather interest in a small Android phone
Do you think all Android phones are too big? I agree! We need to work together to convince someone to build a small Android phone again.
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Asus makes the ZenPhone 10. That's 6 inches. I don't know how it stacks up to the other requirements, I've never used one.
I'm a bit confused about what the OP means with "premium", but at least the price band fits.
It has a locked bootloader, i know because i have one...
I'm curious now that we've talked so much about it. Is it any good, locked bootloader aside?
Yeah its ridiculously fast. My main problem is the bootloader and that it only has usb 2.1 If it had an unlocked bootloader and usb 3 and display outup its fast enough i could use it as a laptop. I tried linux in chroot and it runs smooth. It only has 2 years of updates but that wouldnt be a problem if the bootloader would be unlocked... The speakers and battery are good especially for the size. Talking about the size its perfect for my hands, a lot smaller would be too little for me. The headphone jack is nice but no sd card slot(idk why anyone needs that the base model has 256gb of storage and i use about 100gigs). The camera is good. Youre stuck with the stock software but its not half bad. The display is bright enough but it doesnt go dim enough for my night use so i had to use the display dim mode thing but that makes the colours worse(my eyes are extemely sensitive, i can see well in only moonlight i think for most people the brightness goes low enough). The 144hz actually works but it makes the colours strange. If you turn on the display dimmer and 144hz at the same time the colours become comically bad. Also if you need more brightness the 144hz mode is brighter. I dont really play a lot of games but in geometry dash it works really well, the touch is responsive. The boot time is horrible but idk why. Thats it basically, other than the bootloader and usb im happy with it.
It's on my radar for a while and it annoys me so much that Asus betrayed the community and lied about opening bootloader unlocking again. Xiaomi 13 seems like an alternative if you remove their spuware and can cope with flashing AOSP.
I like mine, mainly small gripes for me like I wish the shielding was a bit better on the headphone jack, Meta apps weren't bundled though ofc you can disable/remove them and the screen could be both brighter and get dimmer (to agree with the other review). I'm also a bit disappointed it doesn't support e-sims, though does support dual physical SIMs.
Performance is great as expected, battery is solid and the camera is good whilst not matching Pixels imo. Asus' skin is pretty light with some nice customisation options (like being able to switch between stock android and their version for certain parts of the OS). I also love the fingerprint sensor on the power button, just makes sense for me and reminds me of my old Xperia Compact phones. Whilst retaining the SD card slot would be handy, I went for 512GB so it's not an issue for me
Wait, you get dual physical sims but they don't repurpose one of the slots for an SD card if you don't use it? Why? At that point it's removing a feature just for the sake of it. Well, for the sake of making you overpay for more storage, but still.
Yeah I'm not a fan, the frame itself is abbreviated so instead of having extra room for a SD card you only get a two sided nano SIM tray
It's really not a small phone though.... it's the same size as the non-max iPhone, minus a couple millimeters of width.
They specifically said "sub 6 inch display", this is 5.9 inches. I'm meeting the brief here.
I mean, the other answer to that is that he could go for the vanilla iPhone, but they also said they want an Android phone, so this is the smallest thing with fairly high specs you can find right now and it's stil a couple fractions of an inch smaller than the small iPhone.
I have no idea why the brief says sub 6 inches when the target is the iphone mini, which is 5.4 inches. Like the Zenfone is a normal sized phone, just marketed as "compact".
It is the smallest I could find on Android, though. The other ones people are recommending is the vanilla S23, and the Pixel 7a, both of which are a 2-3mm wider, like the iPhone is.
I think you're uinderestimating the size difference, though. These things are 60-70ish mm wide. The short side of your thumb is what? 5-8 cm? If my current phone was the width of the Zenfone I would be able to reach the opposite edge with my thumb even with a full wrap-around grip, which is now... well, a couple mm out of reach.
That said, yeah, it's not a 4 inch phone (which bezel-less today would be more like a 5 inch screen). If that's what you want these days I think what the manufacturers are expecting you'll buy on the flagship end is a foldable. Which I wouldn't. But that's the idea at play, I think.
I 100% agree with you. I have an iPhone X and the Zenfone is basically the same size as it. Add a case and it's basically the same size as every other phone. And a foldable phone doesn't fix the core issue.
I also cannot do the full wraparound thing with my middle finger and thumb on my phone.
I considered the Zenphone 10, but the issue is the price. 830 bucks in Europe compared to 630 in the US.
Woof. Depending on what bucks those bucks are that's... a weirdly large, unjustified difference. I didn't know that was the case. I don't get it, for that money you could just order one from the US and have it shipped. Even with customs fees you'd break even.
Still, that's a lot and the region differences suck, but given the lack of options it's still ticking boxes. Plus flagships are like 1.5k these days, somehow, so... that's midrange pricing? I don't know how we got to that being midrange pricing, but apparently that's where we are.
Euros. The issue with shipping something from the US is that there are chances of the device being provider-locked, and also the tax customs here would add some nasty tax on top of it.
Yeah, and it can get stuck in customs. It's a good thing to do if you're there for a bit, even for a layover, but it's harder to buy. Still, man, for that price gap even if you get taxed you'd probably be at worst flat with the official release. That's a 30% hike, plus 10% you're losing in the currency exchange. It's a lot.
I'd maybe shop around. That can't last forever, and a cursory search right now already shows some offers with 50 euros cut off that sticker price (in Amazon.de, for one). Of course that's also for the worst model, so... you know, modern phone pricing.
People basically want another iphone mini, but that's not treated like an afterthought. The Zenfones like what other people said is the size of an iphone x. It's a solid size but it's definitely not small.