With the iPhone 12 mini and then the iPhone 13 mini, Apple tried to boost the market for small smartphones (5.4 inches, in this case). These attempts have obviously been failures, the manufacturer having abandoned the idea – instead, Apple has added a new reference to its catalog: the iPhone 14 Plus with its 6.7-inch screen!
But where Apple targets the very large public with volumes of tens of millions of units, a smaller player can certainly hope to find a place in this segment. After all, there must be two or three users in the world who are looking for a compact smartphone!
At least that’s what you might think, but in fact almost no one has tried their luck, except for Asus, whose Zenfone 9 has a diagonal of 5.9 inches. It doesn’t seem like much by today’s standards, but let’s remember that the screen of the original iPhone measured a postage stamp 3.5 inches!
Last May, Eric Migicovsky launched a cry from the heart for a small Android smartphone, just as much as a rallying cry. The creator of the Pebble connected watches (sadly defunct) brought together a community through a petition which, to date, has nearly 39,000 signatures. From there, a team grouped under the banner “Small Android Phone” (which is not a company, at least not yet) worked seriously on the subject.
The objective is therefore to create a compact Android smartphone (less than 6.1 inches), whose technical characteristics will depend a lot on the screen. Since hardly anyone produces small telephones anymore, screen suppliers have logically abandoned this segment as well. Therefore, it may be necessary to produce screens of the desired size, which may increase the price of the device.
Once the screen is found, everything else will follow: battery size, internal layout of components, performance, design… It should be a mid-range, with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (the generation of it a year ago), with all the same a photo sensor of about fifty megapixels. Ben Bryant, who worked with Migicovsky at Pebble, tells The Verge expect a hefty price tag, around $850. Compare that to the $599 iPhone 13 mini…
Added to this screen problem are production costs that will inevitably be higher than for a high-volume iPhone. The team intends to launch a crowdfunding operation with the ambition to raise between 40 to 50 million dollars (!). Enough to cover the costs of engineering, design, assembly, operations, shipments, etc. In its time, Pebble had raised more than 10 million dollars on Kickstarter, a record to be multiplied by 4 or 5…
At the moment the team is still working on the screen, so the crowdfunding campaign is not for tomorrow. Then it will take 6-9 months for production.