I am part of an on-call schedule but I don't feel comfortable mingling personal devices and work apps and credentials. I wanted an inexpensive device that was small enough I could keep in my pocket with my personal devices. In return for wanting both "cheap" and "small" I was willing to compromise significantly on "performance." All I wanted it to do was to receive texts and phone calls and occasionally a Slack push notification or two.
What I found is that after the OS had been powered on for a few hours, I couldn't even reliably receive texts and phone calls, they would either cause the Phone app to freeze or they just wouldn't ring at all, instead sending a "missed call" push notification minutes later. I don't understand how a company can sell a "phone" that can't even do that much.
I really wanted to like this form factor and still today I would still enjoy having one, but I don't think I could give any more money to Unihertz. I couldn't even get a refund for a clearly defective product.
I think lots of apps probably wouldn't work on such a small screen now.
I am tempted to try using one of the new ones.
I imagine the target audience probably won’t write lengthy emails on this thing. Either way, glad to see some cheap and small Android phone that looks relatively nonsense-free.
I have pretty small hands, and I find the on screen keyboard okay. I do make a lot more typos than I used to with a bigger phone, and type slower, but it's not a big deal for me.
The biggest downside is the camera sucks. I'm hoping the next version (Jelly Star) will be better.
I think the stylesheet changed. This happened to me as well, I had to switch to a reader app.
I typically use Firefox on Android, Samsung (normal sized)
No one seems to question whether a qwerty keyboard is a good fit for this. Everyone somehow accepts that as the only way. But in reality, it doesn't pass even the slightest scrutiny. It's qwerty because that's the layout most people are familiar with from computer keyboards. It's not optimized to take advantage of the touchscreen hardware. Instead, it's a layout that works beautifully for full hands, crammed into a screen where you have use it with just two thumbs that often miss the tiny keys.
I tried to rethink touchscreen text input once[1] but this prototype ended up having such a steep learning curve that even I myself switched back to qwerty. I might try it again sometime in the future but I'm also open to ideas.
[1] https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1517431598857302019
The swipe keyboard I have installed is easy and I actually have it shrunk to the smallest size allowed to minimize movement. I don't post on hacker news with it, I only use sites like HN on my PC, but I am able to write reasonably long emails (although I mainly just email myself notes).
A few months ago I bought the new Jelly, and while it has a slightly larger screen, I didn't like the updated version of Android. I went back to my Atom. If anything happened to it, I would immediately buy another without a second thought.
I had bad experiences with the first jelly (non pro). The promised Android upgrade never came to the non pro version. Other than that it was ok but not something I'd repeat.
There's a handful of apps that aren't available on one or another. I really like f-droid, too, and I wish that apple had a free software directory somewhere.
I find Android Auto less finicky than CarPlay and Google Assistant more useful than Siri. But it feels like voice assistants are actually getting dumber as time goes on.
But eventually I get frustrated and switch to another phone, there's always something to complain about.
The main issue is that most apps require location services or other google stuff that also needlessly sends private data to google. (There are attempts to reimplement the location services api, but they were all flaky for me).
It’s not just that one service, and in practice apps will crash on startup for a week or so, then work, then regress again.
The second problem is that you have to pick third party apps with reasonable privacy practices, and those are buried in the app store search rankings (FDroid makes them easier to find.)
If you don’t care about privacy, then you might have a passable experience under android. The main advantages I noticed were that you can run emulators, and that it is easy to pirate abandonware. (I have a BB-8 sphero, and they didn’t renew the IP license with lucas arts, mostly bricking it. On android, it is possible to pirate the old bundled software. On iOS it is not.)
I have had so many fucking bugs with my iPhone 13 Pro Max:
The camera fucking SUCKS, even compared to my pixel 2 xl. Every photo looks like a cheap watercolor. And the computational photography (night mode) is fucking terrible. The image stabilization is nonexistent compared to the pixel 2 xl, and don’t even get me started on video stabilization
The keyboard will randomly get earsplittingly loud for no reason at all and will have huge typing delay.
Notifications are just worse
My messages app crashes frequently, and contact pictures refuse to show up about half the time
They keyboard is fucking awful compared to gboard, and the iOS gboard isn’t good
Google assistant is orders of magnitude better than Siri, and let’s be real: if you use any assistant it is going to listen to you
Apple Maps is terrible compared to google maps, and apple optionally chooses to gimp the lock screen navigation of everything besides Apple Maps (also yelp )
Voice typing is truly horrendous
The notes app is shit, just doesn’t work very well
I could keep going, but having been on apple thrice and android 4 times, I’m throughly done with apple unless they make some MASSIVE changes
Link to my experience if you’re interested: https://rickytakkar.com/blog_smartphone_detox.html
While I'd love to see different form factors being successful, steer clear of Unihertz.
I only wish the camera was better.
That said, I think this Jelly looks like a good phone for my kids.
Whatever apps that don't work with the screen dimensions I just don't use. Every communication app I need works fine, as does every map and weather app.
I have zero issues with the Proton suite, OSMand, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Authy, WeatherCan, Ring, TidesNearMe, Firefox, Foobar, Podcast Republic, Cx File, Newpipe, and more.
But as it was not particularly fast in 2018, it's only a matter of time until software becomes too slow to use on the phone. Even opening the text messaging app has a visual lag nowadays. The battery life is also not great; I don't really care but it seems to annoy my friends lol.
Eventually I'll probably end up with a Unihertz, but I'm still holding out for a new similarly sleek small phone from Palm.
- The internal databases (such as the messages database) growing larger than the devs intended
- Not enough free storage space to comfortably allow swap files
- 3rd party background processes taking over
Bad code can sometimes happen (usually “just” memory leaks requiring a reboot), but what we usually think of as a rule (“old devices are slower”) is manufacturers pushing more and more features on to the device until it can no longer keep up.
For me, the tradeoff is still worth it for now because it has the best form factor. But at some point within the next decade, it will become impossible.
I don’t see the appeal outside the price and that small android’s are hard to come by.
It ran a super old version of Android and didn't have a browser. It scratched a "detox" itch but made me less reachable at work in a way I felt made me less valuable so I I went back to a smart phone.
This phone seems like a good happy medium that adds friction at the right places.
While it was fun, I found too many apps simply can’t handle that small of a screen. It annoyed me to the point that I switched back to nearly the largest screen I could find.
Sell me a 16:9 phone again dammit.
This phone is 16:9: 480*16/9 = 853.333.
Even my Pixel phone has visible PWM at anything less than 100% brightness, and my iPhone has visible PWM at anything below 50%. :(
