Android

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.

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

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.

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.

North america only frequencies, just so you know.

Unihertz Jelly Star

New band name, I called it!

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.

My buddy at work was looking for the smallest smart phone he could get, I helped him find the Jelly Star. He has been using it for a few months, and he loves it. Fits in his 5th pocket on most jeans and it's a real head turner, everyone is confused and thinks it's a dumb 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

Thanks for the solid writeup! 🙌

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

They have another one with Android 8 that is 2x lighter:

https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro

Unfortunately the main use of smart phones is still web browsing, which continues to demand bigger screens and faster CPUs.