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I don’t mind a camera bar (or “visor”). It’s better than the stupid bump they used to use, because it’s stable, and it also provides a slight angle that makes the phone a little more visible when it’s laying on a desk.
What I don’t like is a super thin phone that has no meaningful battery and is easy to bend. “Bend” means that dropping it results in more than just shock force.
Take a look at JerryRigEverything’s iPhone Air video.
It took 200+ pounds of force, in the middle of the device, to bend it. It was very impressive.
I’ve heard that, and it’s very impressive. Unfortunately, I weigh more than 200 pounds, and putting a significant fraction of my weight on the device is not a particularly remote possibility, given my track record.
This is why you spend much money for name brand phone protector!
Not to make phone tough…
…but so…
… it can sit level on flat surface!
This perfectly illustrates my gripes with whatever is driving the trend of these super thin phones.
First, is anyone even asking for phones to be thinner? Then there’s the camera bump sticking out like a wart. And beyond that, it gets put into a bulky case anyway which negates the super thin thing entirely.
I think the thing that is driving thin phones with big camera bulges are phone designers now factoring in bulky phone cases when thinking about how the phone feels in a pocket. Overwhelmingly phones live in a case and that case becomes the phone in our head - a fat phone is apparently uncomfortable or displeasing somehow so a thin phone means a thinner case which equates to a better overall experience as the phone owner. It will fit in pockets easier, slide into car accessory holders instead of cup holders, allow a phone wallet combo to not be a pocket wad, and overall usability becomes easier for folks with weaker grip strength like older and younger users. There is a lot driving the move to a thinner phone but it does make the underlying device look really goofy.
whatever is driving the trend of these super thin phones
The driving factor is - as always - money.
People will likely no longer buy new phones if it’s all the same when compared to the previous generation.
So the companies make useless stuff up - that nobody really needs - so that they can sell more.
Apple is especially great at this because their base of sheeps is already locked in and swims in too much money that they are willing to spend.
one has to wonder what the ideal thickness is, are we supposed to think it’s just never thin enough? will we have phones that literally cut into the skin of your hand as you hold it and they still brag about how the new model is 4 atoms thinner?
it’s not like they’re getting easier to hold, modern phones are so huge that you need a popsocket for it to be reliably and comfortably held.
Personally, I’m of the camp where I can appreciate a somewhat slimmer design because I’m putting a case on it regardless, and the camera bump doesn’t bother me since the case flattens it out anyway. I have the Xperia 1 V, and I’m pretty happy with the form of it.
that’d make sense if we were talking about phones that are actually thick, but modern phones are all so thin that it’s almost too thin without a case.
modern phones are so huge that you need a popsocket for it to be reliably and comfortably held.
Idk, I think this is just a small hands problem tbh, my hands are pretty average for a guy I think and I have had 0 issues comfortably holding big phones. Even right now I have a P9 Fold and the accompanying case makes it even bigger
Well, thing is women have smaller hands than men on average, and they do make up 50% of the population.
The iPhone 4/SE1 was the perfect design.
No real camera bump, single hand hold, light, durable with a metal back.
If we just added a modern OLED screen, and a modern chip and battery, that design would be perfect.
The 13 mini was close but the stupid camera bump ruined it, bring back the sleek slab
I would buy it.
iPhone 4 was a glass sandwich though. Do you mean iPhone 5?
Yes
As soon as they figure out long distance wireless charging, I wouldn’t be surprised if all phones become collapsible or wearable, negating the need to hold it awkwardly.
I have no idea but they keep making them thinner for…reasons?
My personal “sweet spot” is the OnePlus 3. Not too tall, thin but not unbearably so, and doesn’t sacrifice anything for headphone jack and a decent size battery. Though if I had a choice between “thin” and “removable battery”, I’d take the extra thickness required for the battery cover in a heartbeat. I’d also accept several more mm of thickness if they want to include a slide-out keyboard.
Slideable keyboard phones are my jam. I would love a modern Nokia E7, or Fxtec Pro1. If anyone knows of something like that, let me know!
I actually like thin phones. I find them easier to hold, but I would gladly sacrifice the camera hump for a completely flat back.
If you’re optimizing for circumference with a fixed volume, I feel like a thinner phone is worse?
Before looking for thin phones, look for phones that don’t have a glass back so that not having a case is an actual option.
They still have glass fronts man. Five-ish feet drop onto the screen against concrete with no case? Doesn’t matter what the back is.
Glass backs mean that almost any fall will damage it, but non-glass backs only eliminate cases if you can somehow ensure it never lands face down or on a corner.
Glass backs have very low friction. Set the thing down in bed and its natural floor seeking instincts kick in.
But we just HAVE to have glass backs it’s the ONLY thing that makes phones feel PREMIUM! 😤 ~phone companies
It’s the best way to ensure the resale market sucks, at least. As well as getting people to pay up for replacement parts/devices or upgrade sooner.
I have a perfectly good phone, babied all to hell, lives in a case and never comes out, the works.
Well it must have fallen at some point and caught the camera bump. The lenses are fine, thankfully, but it caused spider webbing of the back glass. I didn’t even know it happened until I saw cracks through my liquid case. Possibly months later.
Resale value now significantly lower for essentially no reason. Almost like they designed the whole thing to be as fragile as possible.
That’s not an option anyway. Metal scratches and dents too easily for that to be viable.
Hear me out: wood
Introducing the new pinePhone: wooden back, wooden buttons, wooden battery, wooden mainboard, and a revolutionary screen made of gorilla wood. You’ll never need a screen protector again!
Been rocking my iPhone 11 Pro Max with no case for a long time.
It’s fantastic.
Do phones really need to be so skinny? Part of the reason I always get a case is not only for protection, but also to deliberately make it a little thicker.
No, they’re just desperate for some kind of differentiator at this point because phones haven’t meaningfully changed in five years. Hell, maybe ten.
Yeah they have. They removed a bunch of features so they can sell more dongles and cloud storage. You know, “innovation”.
Only Essentials brand had something new a while back. Two magnetic power pins on the back and Wireless USB protocol so you could attach add on devices like the 360 video camera, and the Pro audio DAC. It’s too bad they closed up after a few years. The phone was great. Cermamic and Titanium body.
Yeah, the only real improvements in phones over the last decade are the adoption of USB-C and the addition of extra camera lenses, and I never really use the extra lenses on my phone.
I replaced my 2016 Galaxy S7 last year with a Motorola G32 mainly because the Galaxy wasn’t holding a charge or getting software updates anymore. The G32 is actually lower in spec in a few ways (lower-resolution screen, no wireless charging) but it’s still more than adequate for my needs, has a headphone jack and MicroSD slot and supports LineageOS (although I haven’t installed that yet.)
Even the S7 upgrade wasn’t strictly necessary but I saw a good deal and didn’t like the way my LG G2’s volume buttons were on the back.
We’re well past the point where smartphones should’ve been fully comodified and where we should be able to get generic versions based on common standards (i.e. a common platform open to OS developers without the need for a specialized build for each phone.)
This has become one of the useless marketing figures everyone chases because they made it seem important in the first place.
I absolutely prefer having something a bit thicker, as it fits the palm better.
It’s really funny to me that we’re having these conversations all over again. I had the Moto Z back in 2016 and it was almost half a mm thinner than the 2025 iPhone Air. (As always, here’s Apple still playing catchup, a decade later this time.)
I honestly didn’t mind it - the Moto Z had a Moto Mods battery that snapped on the back (in a MUCH more elegant manner than Apple’s magsafe battery implementation in my opinion) and so I always knew that was an option if the battery life became a concern over time. And I loved that the extended battery made the back of the phone perfectly flush with the camera bump too, so if you elected to add battery life, it was literally what we’ve all asked for the whole time: Just make it thicker and add battery. But if you didn’t need extended battery life, then you had a razer thin phone (and a camera bump), probably the thinnest I had until the Fold7 at 4.2mm.
I wish that Motorola’s solution had stuck, because they solved this problem already, meanwhile everybody is here reinventing the wheel over and over again in 2025. 🤦
Well, you cannot cheat physics. You get two of resolution, depth, and thin-ness. If they want resolution and depth, they need the optics to do this.
Give me a fuckin’ Pipboy. I’ll be so ripped after a month of watching porn on it while wearing it.
Parascope lenses don’t require cheating physics.
Periscope? (my Sony phone has one)
The next iteration will be a cheese wedge, 1mm thin on one side and 1cm thick on the other.
I’d rather have that. it’ll actually stay stable when you put it down, plus the screen would be slightly tilted upwards so you can see it better when it’s just there on the table.
Actually razor blade sharp. One atom thick iPhone
People slicing their hand are just holding them wrong
you need mechanical stability a bit too, so if it’s too thin, it just breaks too easily.
IMO the perfect size for a smartphone should be the weight of an apple (fruit) or some other snack like croissant, something that you can comfortably hold in one hand.
Yeah, but if it’s an iPhone… you probably have to pay Apple a proprietary fee; due to becoming injured by their patented technology.
Your phone is only as thin as it’s thickest point.
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You other brothers can’t deny.
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Seriously. How did we get to the point where so many phones are designed for you to set them down directly on the camera lens? What are we doing?
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Marketing
No, but hell no
Give me a chunky phone with a week long battery
Better yet, week long replaceable battery
You’re describing rugged phones
Apple: here is your phone with a weak, long battery.
Regular sex will make your day.
But anal sex will make your hole weak.
It will weight more than kilogramme
Uhm IIRC typical battery is 2000 mAh/day, so one week battery is 14 Ah/day, which is 50 Wh assuming 3.7 V.
A typical sodium ion battery (which i very much like btw) typically holds 0.2 kWh/kg, so 200 Wh/kg, so to store 50 Wh, you’d need around 250g of battery.
For reference, i think smartphones should be about as heavy as an apple (fruit) which is 100g average. And the battery makes most of that weight (like, 80%). So the battery could be about 80g, which would store 16 Wh of energy. That would make about 4000 mAh. Which is what many phones today already have. Which lasts for 1-2 days.
I had an Oukitel that I ran for almost 4 weeks. Had to charge it for a trip off grid. Talk about chunky!
Might buy another model, but had to drop Verizon to get it working and T-Mobile took a week to figure out how to activate it. PITA, but it was solid once working. Great BT speaker, couldn’t kill the battery, everything worked great. Carrying the thing was a pain, even with a pack. Not sure I want all that mass again.
If you want a phone you can beat a man to death with, Oukitel it is!
With its ability to produce an 8D sound effect
Wow. They cracked string theory.
More seriously, does it have a 3.5mm jack?
Cheaper than I thought it’d be
Oh man, Til shit this brand, good shout!
Yes, and, no.
It’s a hand ergonomics thing. People with smaller hands who still want a larger screen have an easier time holding the phone body if it’s thin. The camera bump is outside of the handholding area so stuffing the big circuitry there lets you make a better hand experience.
Tbh, the camera bumps are nice if you use phone cases. They allow the phone+ phone case thickness to be much thinner than otherwise. Provided they aren’t enormous unexplainable bumps like the pixel phones’
Pretty well packed with sensors isn’t it?
It is not, especially compared to solutions like Samsung’s that have a different bump for each camera. The food thing with that design is, you can expose the camera and make the case form-fit around, which doesn’t make the phone thicker. Google pixel cases that do that expose this entire slab to the elements though, this glass will get scratched quite easily
You’re taking about this? It won’t sit flat on its back, rocking around every time you tap it.
Not if you use a case. That’s my point
I have a case for this exact phone, it still rocks with a case.
Any phone case worth more than a pile of dog fecal matter will put a rim around the lense glass or indentation to keep it from being flush with the rest of the phone (and surface you lay it on). The problem with this particular Samsung is the lense portrudes far too much, making cases excessively thick or in my case, wobbly when laid flat.
I prefer it when camera bumps are symmetrical but still individual
Why do phones have to be as slimmed down as a coke addicted supermodel from the 90s anyway?
I’d much prefer they shrink the fucking things enough that they fit in your pocket.
