Small phone lovers... our era is not over. Yesterday I discovered the Unihertz Jelly Star. I fell in love. I will be reporting back.

Nobody is disabling 4G bands except the bands they lied about being 4G in the first place?

4G is here to stay for a long while. It's fast enough for 99% of cases and 5G only covers very small areas, and will only be used (at least for now) on crowded areas where it makes sense.

Also, this device has 480p screen... I think 4G is pretty fine.

it has no 5G support

Ty for clarifying that.

The exact reason I opted not to get this phone. I kind of don't understand why so many lesser known brands have such limited bands on their phones. Does it add that much to the cost?

I'm in the UK and I've not yet had a 5G phone. We're also only having 3G turned off in the immediate future

I can tell you that it works fine using T-Mobile. It picks up the same bands as my LG V60 (with 5g turned off). I can't speak about any other carrier, though.

Isn't it crazy? When I found it I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean... Hopefully it does not disappoint when I get it

It's actually a bit more subtle than consumers not buying them.

When LTE came out, it was inefficient and used lower frequencies than cell phones used before. So they needed big phones that they could stick big batteries and antennas in.

Smaller phones existed, but often lacked features of big phones, and battery life was terrible due to the aforementioned power consumption problem. Likewise, reception suffered.

Now, the power problem has been solved and LTE uses less power than CDMA techs did. Antenna and radio design has improved to mitigate reception issues so smaller antennae don't hurt as much as they once did. However, now phones have giant camera modules in them and antennae for a plethora of services and features they think people want like UWB, NFC, wireless charging. (They all have their place, just stating this because they aren't "essential".)

People stopped buying small phones because they were "terrible" by comparison. Then manufacturers claimed people didn't want small phones, so they stopped making them. Now we are stuck because all the junk they throw in phones need all that space.

Tl;dr: the wireless industry killed small phones and blamed consumers.

I have not forgotten. And this is not so much swimming upstream but rather, as Captain America said, it's more like planting yourself like a tree and say "no, you move".

More so they upsold people to the bigger models. If they had exactly the same specifications other than size, I bet a much larger set of people buy the smaller one. The phone in this post does look a bit too small though.

Yeah, this seems like a targeted ad written by some llm. I have a larger phone and still cannot stand the size of the "keyboard" on it.. Can only imagine how fun it would be typing on that screen, even if the keyboard was fullscreen.

Nah, OEMs had to make them larger to provide sufficient cooling surface area for the battery and cpu.

That was the first driver, and then marketing took over to make larger phones seem like a better choice.

Now that Android is much more power efficient (and the hardware is too), we could have smaller phones with only a modest reduction in performance.

Stuff like ceramic or glass backs were also as much about cooling, but marketed as a cool feature.

Ceramic and glass transfer heat far better than plastic. So when you're running your flagship phablet at max to play a game, it can shed that heat much more readily, and also charge the battery at 15watts.

I think Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro has a jack and IR, iirc, not sure about the programmable button

I am squatting on Jacuzzi Infection.

This. I asked this question on unihertz kickstarter campaign page, and their answer was avoiding the question.

Major android versions are nice, but security updates are a must, or you'll be taking huge risks with the data on your phone.

What country?

Can't say they'd work 100% on this phone, but there are apps that allow you to switch your audio input/output that may help

I didn't even know something like that was possible!

Not too bad. Lacking band 71 won't really matter on t-mobile as they are flipping that to full 5G in many markets. Band 41 still exists for speed in most places for now.

Missing band 14 will hurt long range coverage on at&t though, but still has 12 and 5 for long range on at&t (places like Nebraska where at&t doesn't have any band 12 or 5 will have a bad time though.)

Band 13 means Verizon long range will work, if Verizon allows it on the network.

@BeatTakeshi @unknowing8343
asus had a gold on their hands with compact zenfones, then they had to mess it up by 2 years of support and an unlocked bootloader (which i would be personally fine with if the support was more than 2 years)

I know this is opposite of what you want, but I used to melt the plastic on the SIM, take the chip and with a small piece of glue place it on the micro SD card, thus two simcards and extra storage

I don't think that is possible, I believe one of the two slots is nanoSIM only, but will report back.

Hopefully everything goes fine!

Sell it!

Fuck, man. That looks amazing and it kind of turns the Jelly Star into what I always wanted; a fully functional phone with controller hardware, small enough to easily pocket the entire thing. I almost regret passing on this phone now.

I can't give personal opinions yet, but reviews seem to say that it's "fine", which for a phone of this size, I think that's a success. Although "fine" might not be the "good" that you are looking for.

It's 48 MP, which is great for zooming but I don't think it has any other perk. Low light pics seem to be pretty meh. It's also just one camera. Absolutely fine for me, I know that. But definitely will be worse than the Pixels and the iPhones.

Then use it on landscape mode 😉➖