
There Are No More Small Phones - laktak
https://www.wired.com/story/goodbye-iphone-se-small-phones/
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pnloyd
>> The larger the screen, the more you do with it.

I think this is getting at an interesting point. Over the past decade
smartphones undertook a rapid and seem less evolution from a fancy gadget into
what's now basically a full fledged minature computing device. It still looks
relatively the same, but now has a fundamentaly different role in our daily
lives, for better or for worse.

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ChrisLTD
Yes, but let’s not kid ourselves, people are using their big screen phones
primarily for messaging, social media, and watching videos. It’s not all that
different from what we were using them for 5 years ago.

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yohann305
I'm a mobile app developer, i develop apps on a computer, not on the
smartphone itself, nor does any developer i know. I tried an Android setup a
couple years back, the overall experience was negative.

A phone cannot replace a computer until that happens. (at least for people
like me)

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Double_a_92
For me personally the limiting factor is the keyboard. If it's a PITA to write
something, I'm not encouraged to write productive things on a smartphone.

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WorldMaker
I've got a foldable Bluetooth keyboard and my phone supports Miracast, and for
brief moments at a time I can pretend I have a weirdly small laptop.

It's a "present"/"past-future" that Microsoft envisioned years back that we
have all the technical solutions, just not all the practical solutions.
Android is too fragmented to sell such a vision wholesale across the platform,
and Apple too disinterested, too invested/stuck in keeping devices to specific
niches (because it sells more devices).

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emrox
I'm currently waiting for my Atom Phone. It was sold good, so I think there is
still a market niche, even it is small.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/atom-
world-s...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/atom-world-s-
smallest-4g-rugged-smartphone/)

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cwt137
I run with my phone and I hate the arm bands. With phones getting bigger, it
is harder to securely put the phone in my pocket.

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joegahona
Try a Flipbelt or the Nathan, which is a Flipbelt knockoff. I'm a runner and
they're essential now.

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thedaemon
These are not phones. A smart phone is not a phone. Perhaps we should drop the
phone tag? It's like how podcasts aren't limited to iPods. It's a term that no
longer means what it says.

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WorldMaker
I think it's an interesting bend of language. I've wondered if phone is just
getting slowly recycled as the word for "handheld computer". It's not a bad
reuse of the word, but does lead to a lot of interesting questions about
future usage of the word. Would it colonize other computing spaces?
"Deskphone" and "Lapphone" instead of "Desktop" and "Laptop", for instance?

That's kind of the future of the word that AT&T envisioned back in the 1950s
and 1960s Worlds Fairs and Advertising strategies, so it has a weird retro
sci-fi charm here as well, were that to happen.

(Though I'm very pro reusing old, small tech words in new ways. I very much
advocate that we should recycle "facsimile machine" aka "fax machine" to mean
"3-D Printer", giving us the word "fax" back as "thing I 3-D printed", which
currently doesn't really have a good word.)

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Isamu
The Apple Watch is a phone. You can call and text. With Airpods sound quality
is good.

