Stop comparing it by screen size. Bezels are waaay smaller now than they used to be.
I see a lot of people saying “small?! How could this be small, the screen is X inches! My phone from 2014 was only Y inches!” while completely ignoring that slim bezels mean the phone is about the same size.
Comparing the S24 to the S5 from a decade ago, the S24 has a frontal area of 10,437mm², and the S5 is 10,366mm². The newer one is marginally smaller.
You wouldn’t think that comparing screen sizes, though. You’d look at the screen size and say “Omg it’s over an inch larger, this phone must be MASSIVE!”
Granted, if you go back to like the iPhone 4 era and earlier, phones genuinely were smaller. But phone sizes haven’t really changed much at all in the past decade, yet people act like they get larger every generation.
Sony used to have the best software support outside of the Nexus phones (at least on their flagship devices, anyway), then, despite releasing fewer models, it went down to how it is today.
Now, granted, some of that is actually other OEMs picking up the slack as opposed to Sony actually doing worse, but Sony’s software support has definitely deteriorated.
Good to see they’re sorting it out. The Xperia phones I’ve had have all been very good. I used to develop a ROM for some Sony devices and they were extremely dev-friendly too, promptly releasing kernel sources and even putting full, bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub.
Plus it looked like Web Apps were gonna become huge.
I know the words “web app” send some on Lemmy into a frenzied rage, but they’d be amazing from a platform agnostic perspective.
Imagine if the biggest barrier to entry for new smartphone OSes (app support) was gone. It’d be huge.
But seeing it as a threat to their business models (don’t get that 30% cut if it’s not through the App/Play stores), Apple and Google have had pretty shitty support for them.
If a Linux phone was out today and had good hardware and software, it’d still fail just like Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS did. WebApps would give it a strong chance though.
Yeah, but it’s not like a typical Linux installation on a PC would be. You can’t just install a Flatpak application or anything like that. It doesn’t use many of the GNU core utilities that most other Linux distros use, and doesn’t use a mainline kernel.
People that ask for Linux phones know Android is Linux.
It’s just a lot more concise to say than “I want a phone with an open bootloader and hardware fully compatible with a mainline Linux kernel. I want to have a phone that can run a Phosh/Gnome Mobile/Plasma Mobile UI and on the backend work in a similar way to how desktop Linux would.”
It’s 2% larger than a phone you happily called compact.
Stop moving goalposts.
Bezels do matter. Their shrinking has allowed for large screens on phones without increasing the size. Comparing compactness of phones by their screen size rather than actual size is misguided.
Mate come on you’re moving the goalposts now. First an iPhone is compact now it’s not? Make your mind up!
The iPhone mini is long gone and the Xperia compact series is long gone too. Nobody bought them.
And no, the 6.3" screen doesn’t make it lose meaning. If the bezels shrink and the screen grows but the phone is the same size… then the phone is the same size.
My laptop, thanks to modern slim bezels, has a 14.something inch screen in a space that traditionally would’ve had a 13 inch screen.
Is it less compact because the screen is larger? Your argument is that the laptop has grown, despite the dimensions staying the same.