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

unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de to Android@lemmy.world – 221 points – Jelly Star - The World's Smallest Android 13 Smartphone
unihertz.com

Go and check the link, but essentially:

  • small
  • 2023 release (Android 13)
  • HEADPHONE JACK (I was almost sold here)
  • NFC
  • 8GB RAM (that is powerful)
  • 256 GB internal storage
  • Dual SIM or SIM+MicroSD
  • IR BLASTER (whatttttttt)
  • LED indicators (front AND BACK)
  • fingerprint scanner
  • face ID
  • FM Radio
  • PROGRAMMABLE BUTTON (ok I'm in love already STOPPP)

I mean... this list is mindblowing. So...

What's the downside?

Honestly, you can go and check all reviews... but this phone is virtually perfect for the size, the only issue I have is that the screen is a bit too tiny, 3 inches, and 480p, and I think this will make many people run away.

It should make me look elsewhere also... but where? Any other small phone with a bigger screen is pretty bad, old, etc... and I really needed a new phone, so I realised this was an opportunity to commit to the cause, and buy and hopefully push this form factor from Unihertz to mainstream brands.

Hopefully one day we can get one with a slightly bigger screen, I believe 4 inches and 1080p would be brutal. But for now... I think I've found my new phone. In fact, I bought it 3 hours after knowing its existance.

If you are not sold yet...

Go check reviews on YouTube (example). Honestly, you'll see every reviewer falls in love with the device, even non-small phone lovers. It looks like it performs pretty well, it's decently fast, battery is solid, screen is bright and colorful, the LEDs are really useful, even Face ID (which I'll probably disable) is quick, it does not heat up at all, and even photos are pretty decent...

And it's something like 200 $. Come on. What a deal.

Will report back.

So, what do you think?

83

And like all of these novelty phones, it has no 5G support and extremely narrow 4G band support, which means this will be nearly worthless for users in North America. And it will quickly become even more worthless as carriers are actively discontinuing their existing 3G and 4G bands.

This'll work great for most people who don't want to actually use it as a phone. I.e. it'd make a killer media playback device, remote control, or tiny PDA.

I was interested in their Titan a while ago but it, like all of their phones, has the same problem. There is no sense whatsoever in buying a new phone in 2024 that has such piddling network support.

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.

5G covers the same area as 4G on a given frequency. They're ostensibly the same technology on the air interface. The original name of 5G was "LTE2" in fact. Carriers are moving to 5G standalone where all voice, text, data are on 5G. In the US, T-Mobile has 5G on their band 71, which is 600MHz, likewise AT&T runs 5G on their 850MHz band. These bands can reach many miles away from a cell site. I regularly have seen a 5G connection to a site 8 miles away from me, for example.

The coverage will be practically the same as 4G, but slightly worse than 3G. (Which was also true for 4G.)

Carriers will likely do a slow roll over the next 5-10 years migrating 4G bands to 5G until only one or two are left on 4G for legacy devices. Not really an if, as much as a when.

Here in Germany two out of three mobile networks have almost full 5G coverage. 3G is already mostly dead. 4G will stay for a little longer but it’ll be replaced by 5G entirely, as soon as the carriers deem it financially worthwhile to ditch the older tech.

2 more...

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

That would likely be why they specified North America

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.

2 more...

Headphone jacks, IR blasters, AND an FM radio? This phone never left the rad days of android.

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

Please do update after you've used it as your daily driver for a month! Would love love love to hear about it.

Also if OP posts an update and someone happens to see this comment, will you reply here or tag me? TIA!

Unrelated, but I just want to say thank you for actually posting content that is relevant to the community. It's enjoyable and appreciated.

I realised this was an opportunity to commit to the cause, and buy and hopefully push this form factor from Unihertz to mainstream brands.

You seem to forget that all phones used to be small. They didn't stop making them because OEMs didn't like them. They stopped making them because consumers didn't buy them.

So while I appreciate the effort, I fear it is in vain. You're swimming upstream.

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".

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.

Oh, damn, so I write like AI, should I take that as compliment or criticism?

I am just a dude with small hands that did not know this phone existed until now. And I fell in love. That's it.

I guess a compliment. Sorry, this last year or so has made me very skeptical of anything I see online that seems a little spontaneous. So many companies trying to act like bros and just find something amazing they have to tell us about. Unfortunately it's clouding up the posts where people actually do find something amazing. I like this, and would actually look into it if it had better comments on the U.S. coverage or bands. Still not sure how I would do with the keyboard, but I do like the small form factor. Apologies again if you are a real person. In the meantime I am going to need you to click on every picture that contains a gopher. :)

No worry, I understand. As I said, I will report back, and I am even thinking of uploading videos about this, specially if it turns out as good as it seems. I hate that neither MKBHD, LTT, JerryRig... No one showed this bad boy while they all cried that small phones are dying... Well, now I am starting to believe they might be part of the problem...

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.

Except that's physically impossible. Apple got very close but still no one bought them.

I mean other than screen size and battery size, they could have the same specs. It was a theoretical though, people like buying features they don't need or just like to have the best they can, even if that means having a larger phone. I think anything past ~6 inch screens is just way too large, but some people enjoy their phablets, so I wouldn't like to see that option disappear for them either.

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.

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

No they didn't. They put the same CPU in smaller models.

Lol it's really easy, people like big screens - nothing else.

Wow Headphone jack, programmable button, IR blaster...

Honestly, I love having a large phone because I have fat fingers and bad eyesight. I would absolutely buy this phone if it were larger. I might buy it anyway and learn to live with a small screen.

I didn't find any information on long term software security support, and I don't need phones to chase the latest Android releases, but the security updates are important to me.

I was excited when I bought Palm phone, but they didn't support the security software soon after.

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.

I actually just got one a few days ago. Only issue i have is if you have a usb c cable for power and audio for use on a car or something it gets confused and won't put audio through the cable. However standard usb c headphones do still work if you need them

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!

It was a must back when I was using my pixel 3 so I could listen to music and charge my phone at the same time since it didn't have a headphone jack.

Now for for this use case I'm used to just having to put in one cable.

Bands: 2G GSM (bands 2/3/5/8), 3G WCDMA (bands 1/2/4/5/6/8/19), 3G CDMA2000 (bands BC0/BC1), 4G FDD-LTE (bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/13/17/18/19/20/25/26/28A/28B/66), 4G TDD-LTE (bands 34/38/39/40/41)

As long as your carrier has LTE bands that it supports, I guess

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.

Such a fun phone, I absolutely love it. It does everything a modern mid to lower mid range phone does. But typing is heavy. I put a custom Thumbkey fork on it, and now it's... okay :D

For me, that camera is a dealbreaker. I take a lot of pictures so the #1 feature I'm looking for is camera quality

Otherwise that thing looks awesome

A bummer that Asus dropped the compact zenfone this year... Hope they bring it back, maybe every other year

@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)

When you report back;

It says you can switch a sim slot for an sd card slot. Could you choose to do two sd card slots instead? This looks great as a small mp3 player.

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.

I love the idea! If there was good support from something like GrapheneOS or /e/OS I would be looking at one of these.

The spech is amazing, that's practically what I want in a phone, although I have one more requirement: Qualcomm CPU. I wanna install custom ROMs

Man I wish I knew about this a few weeks ago, I just replaced my pixel 5 that broke with a cheap OnePlus Nord N30 and let me tell you, I fucking hate this phone lol. If I could justify spending more money right now I'd replace it with this.

There are a lot of 3" Chinese Android phones, but I've never seen one actually having normal specs (well, besides the display perhaps, I suspect its size isn't the only issue).

Interesting company, I considered getting their "tank" when I needed a new phone a few months ago, although I decided to go with doogee instead. As the name implies it's rather the opposite of this.

I got a Jelly 2 a couple years ago to reduce my smartphone addiction, and I loved it. It runs well and the build quality is great. (I ended up switching back to my normal phone, but that's not the Jelly 2's fault. I'm just weak)

I bought one a couple of months ago. I think it's fantastic both for the size and the price. It's a bit too small of a screen for my aging eyes, but otherwise it works great. I'm keeping it to or when I travel or other good use. Edit: the cameras are... OK. Nothing great, but serviceable. Gcam helps, Google for versions. Also, yes, you can root it. Also GSI flash works, but you lose functions. The battery charges super fast, given it's size. It accepts like 10w charging current.

There's a pretty neat gaming case available for this as well https://lemux.minnix.dev/post/203271

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 loved this phone! I had a jelly 2. It didn't work with my train ticket app, so I had to switch to something bigger. Great conversation piece too.

The bands wouldn’t work for me. I’d be outside coverage most of the time. The price is more than an A15 5G… Seems like old tech at a premium price.

What's the camera like? I take a ton of photos and really need good quality.

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.