Jelly Pro. Hit or flop?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/jelly-the-smallest-4g-smartphone

I’d be interested to see what people here make of this bit of kit that’s soon to hit the market. It might well be that a lot of people here would find a 2.45 inch screen on a phone just way too silly but is there a market for it??

I have considered ditching a smart phone all together myself. I only really used it to look at Facebook and the news (mostly the BBC news app) but since the Brexit referendum result was announced I just don’t look at these things any more, head-in-the-sand style!!!

Three things have stopped me from getting a little calls-and-text-only effort.

  1. Messaging. Having only the ability to send messages via text (SMS) is not good enough these days.
  2. Podcasts. I’d have to find an alternative way of getting my podcasts to the car. This would be a ball ache without a smart phone.
  3. Writing text messages on a stupid number pad like an animal. That can just fuck right off. No.

Because I don’t play games or watch videos on my phone, just podcasts in the car and the occasional message, I’ve not bothered spending £600 on a new phone recently. I’m still using a 2013 LG Nexus 5 (Hammerhead). A quick high5 to some jolly decent chaps on XDA for their superb Rom.

I totally understand why this phone would be no good for people with certain jobs or lifestyles, but are there enough people out there who don’t need the latest processor/gpu to make this a viable product?

Predictions please people! Does the market actually want this product? Is destined to become an historical oddity or is there a section of the market that is currently not being catered for?

Oh yeah, for the record I’m a cheapskate who find the teeny tiny price tag attractive.

Paul.

below is from here

Here’s the full spec of the Jelly:

1.1GHz quad-core processor
2.45-inch five-point touchscreen (240-by-432 resolution)
1GB RAM (2GB in Jelly Pro)
16GB internal storage (32GB in Jelly Pro)
Android 7.0 Nougat
4G LTE
950mAh battery
2MP front-facing and 8MP rear cameras
Dual nano SIM card slots
802.11 a/b/g/n 2.4GHz/5Ghz WiFi
Bluetooth 4.0
GPS, G-Sensor, Compass, Gyroscope

I like small phones. There are no small good phones on the market, apart from the iPhone SE. So this is a welcome innovation. However, it’s not very pretty at all, and the bezel is huge. It’s good to see that it’s getting some interest, though. It seems unnecessarily underpowered, which is unfortunate; 1GB of RAM is not a lot at all, and a 240×432 screen is also rubbish. So I think this is mostly an unfortunate example of “oh, you want a small phone? you must want it to be old and not very good as well, then! no problem”, so I wouldn’t buy it. A million dollars worth of people apparently will, though.

The size related specs seem to be roughly a scaled version of my 2011 HTC Wildfire S. In other words, slightly shorter and a fair bit narrower. The screen resolution is 240x432 vs 320x480. The amount of bezel is about the same.

Point is, it feels like they’re using screen technology from 2011. In a small phone you’d think trying to minimise bezel and maximise pixel count would be even more important than for a big phone.

I agree entirely. If the phone were that size and not underpowered (and had an edge-to-edge hidpi screen like the Essential) then I’d think it was the best thing ever :slight_smile:

Yeah, It was definitely manufactured to a price, rather than a specification. I’m thinking they weren’t brave enough to do what @ralight suggests with regard to minimising the bezel and maximising the pixel count. After all, the cheaper something is the more people are willing to pay for it.

It was almost certainly made with the developing markets in mind. I say this as the dual SIM feature is a big plus point in certain markets such as India.

Yeah, These were my main concerns. The “Pro” version is a bit less feeble in the RAM department at 2GB.

As is often the case with electronics you get what you pay for, and after pledging/paying $104 (just over £80) for a brand new phone and an spare replaceable battery i’m not expecting much!

I’m just hoping my rather modest requirements are not going to be too taxing. As long as there’s not a horrible lag every time I try and do something I’ll be happy. We’ll see anyway. I’ll give it a fortnight and if it’s not doing it for me it’ll be on eBay shortly after!

Do report back on what it’s like :slight_smile:

I’ve been eyeing this phone as well, but I’ve become very wary of everything Android without proper update management. It doesn’t state anywhere what their update policy will be, which doesn’t bode well.

I would love a small dual sim phone with great battery life, great security updates, a nice screen and a decent camera. I’ve gone the Apple route a year ago, to cater for these needs. 5S for work and an SE for private use

But like sil says: do report back to see what it’s like!.

I’ve been interested in small phone for a while, not because I want a small phone, but because I want a small battery with 4G, bluetooth and just enough screen to be used as a fall-back. We’re almost moving past that form-factor.

At some point we’re going to have separate things for input/output instead of just one black rectangle.

So when ‘mobile’ I use devices for:

  • Audio (mostly podcasts).
  • Messaging, email.
  • Reading (news, tech stuff)
  • Watching video

For those I need power, connectivity, visual output, audio output, and applications/processing power. But where each of those things happens is likely to change.

If you take the audio part, I have a bluetooth headset that I basically wear all the time, a SBH20 bluetoothed to my phone. It has a 6 hour battery (usage, all day standby), buttons for play/pause, FF, RW, volume, so the task of podcast listening is not done on my phone. I setup the subscriptions and order the list on my phone, but then it’s all on a tiny device hooked to my collar.

In future I can see the visual output going that way as well, so instead of stuffing a 7" screen in your trouser pocket, you have glasses with an equivalent to a 50" screen in front of your face.

I’ve found that if I use a tablet for reading on the bus/train instead of my phone, I enjoy it more and my eyes don’t go myopic afterwards (because I can hold it further away). If that moved to glasses, so much the better.

There are other things that need to come into play, but the first step is a ‘small phone’ and other devices for audio & visuals.