Thanks!
The Xperia5 is interesting, BUT it is 2 years old now....
I would be OK with the Samsung s22, I think....
I find the diagonal to be fine. The iPhone mini is the perfect size for a phone. It is 5.4" diag. I would be fine up to 5.8 or so, I think. Narrow is more important than short.
Isn't it crazy that with all the makers of android phones, there isn't one of them specializing in a mini-derived form factor.
I am going to see when the s22 is coming out.
The Xperia 5 is a series: there is also an Xperia 5 II from last year and an Xperia 5 III was released a couple of months ago. They are a good width (68mm) but rather tall. The big drawback is that Sony charge very high prices.
I'm watching the s22 because my Pixel 2 is not going to last another year and the reasonable-sized options are very limited. Personally it's looking slightly wider than I'd prefer, but it's about as good as there is at the moment. The Xperia 5 III is a better width, but my problem there is the price (not that I
can't afford it, but I don't believe that any phone justifies those prices and hence am reluctant to pay them). I'd consider the ASUS Xenfone 8, but it doesn't meet your storage requirements (and since ASUS have only released the 128GB version in the UK it doesn't meet mine either). Frankly I'd be happy with a mid-ranger, but there aren't many of those of a reasonable size either (the Xperia 10 III perhaps, but I'd prefer a 700 series processor to a 600 series).
I think the problem is an old one: for most manufacturers this is a low-profit business, so they tend to only produce whatever single type of device they think sells best (and cut costs where they can). So over the last 14 years phones have become steadily more uniform in their design and, in recent years, even their size. And when they started making big phones they sold them at a premium, which mades them more attractive to the manufacturer and hence gave them the incentive to market that as the norm. But I suspect that one big factor here is people who don't own a computer and use their phone for everything: for people like that I can see screen size as being more important, whereas for me once the device is wider than about 66mm every increase is just an inconvenience. But as anyone who has watched the phone market for any time knows, it tends to provide a plethora of one type of device and to just ignore anyone with different preferences: and if you offer nothing else, in the end most people will buy what's available and so the sales losses are mitigated by the lack of any alternative.
But what about the iPhone Mini? There is a consistent story that this line will end next year, but by the standards of anyone else it's actually been highly profitable (e.g. in Q1 2021 it was the 6th-highest revenue-generating phone in the world, with the Galaxy s21 Ultra, at number 5, the only non-Apple device above it). However it sells in smaller volumes and at lower prices than the other iPhone and iPhone Pro models, so unless all of the rumours are wrong it sounds like Apple have decided that they could make even more money if they only sold larger (and higher-margin) phones. And that really tells you about how the phone market works: it's not even about whether there is a profitable market for a type of device, if they think they will make more money by removing that device and telling its users they should like what they are given they will do so. And that is what gets us to where we are now.
