It’s great. I keep it in my fanny pack.
Edit: it’s a uniherz jelly star (green)
I fuckin LOVE the Jelly Star! I use it as my music player. Expandable memory, headphone jack, runs BlackPlayer and Podcast Addict. Don’t need it to do anything else in the world. Wonderful device.
Don’t be fooled, that’s actually a galaxy s25 ultra. It’s just that this guy has massive hands.
Please tell me how you like it. I used to have the palm which is a bit smaller. I loved it though it lacked in battery and was occasionally expectedly slow. I’ve since smashed 2 to bits and the cases weren’t super available then and I didn’t have a printer to make one yet. I used it mostly for travel but I’m considering switching to something like this for a daily driver.
This battery lasts longer than I thought when I purchased, and it’s much more powerful than it has any right to be, being this small. All in all, I love it. It’s perfect for my needs. I’ve had “cooler” phones that were “nicer” to use when I used phones a lot, but this is absolutely the perfect phone for me now. It can do everything a full size phone can do functionally, but it’s tiny, out of the way, and it looks cool. Very utilitarian. Great for people who don’t use phones as much as the average person, or is very conscious about how much stuff they have in their pockets.
But how long does the battery last?
Actually quite a long time. It comes with an aggressive battery saving mode that kills things in the background, but it’s incredibly configurable. More so than possibly any phone’s battery management system I’ve used. I don’t have it set very aggressively because I like things like immich to auto-upload photos to my home server, and other things like that, I keep bluetooth on all the time for my smart watch, and even then the battery can last for 2 days straight, especially if the generic android “battery saver” mode is enabled.
I think it comes down to the tiny screen not using much power haha.
pretty neat phone, really love the idea, but im kind of afraid to order things through aliexpress. not sure hows the return policy, and if they provide repairs and guarantee. im also afraid that i’d find some dealbreaker, and would have to keep a “normal” phone with me too
i saw it has nfc. does the super strict banking apps work on it? like for ex.: revolut and other bigger banks apps
No need to use aliexpress, you can order directly from their site, and through dumwireless (which has an exclusive green version):
https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star
https://dumbwireless.com/products/jelly-star
Edit: also yes it works with chase, capital one, google pay, and those are the only ones I’ve tried so far. I’ve paid via NFC with it as well.
Not sure the return policy with those two, but it’s like $200, one of the cheapest phones I’ve ever owned. Might make it worth the risk for some people. The risk turned out to be a win for me, at least.
I love mine. It fits comfortably in my bra, unlike my previous phone. Some games are too small, especially text-heavy ones that don’t scale the text. That’s ok. I shouldn’t play so many phone games anyway.
Favorite comment from a coworker: [exasperated] “Could you find a smaller phone‽”
“I would if I could!”
Actual answer: “no, I tried!”
If unihertz supported a viable AOSP alternative they would be the perfect smartphones - the hardware seems fantastic. In fact, if they ever do open up to something like Graphene I might just buy one from each of their lines.
They’re rootable (flashable) from what I’ve read, would just take someone wanting to compile Lineage for it.
At least since it’s bootloader unlockable, you can root it and disable what you want, though as I understand they ship with a pretty vanilla OS.
Yea, not the same as Lineage, but far better than most.
This you, OP:
???
Hahahahaha
How the turns have tabled!
You can’t fool me with your giant hands!
A phone with a full sized HDMI connector? Neat!
I thought Andre the Giant passed away decades ago…
I’ve had mine since they shipped out the Kickstarter orders (two years). Thing is an amazing piece of engineering. Even has unusual extras like call recording, IR blaster, headphone jack, & an FM radio. About the only thing missing is 5G radio support (unless you care about wireless charging, but it charges so fast that it’s no big deal), although I wish the battery were user-replaceable. At least the AccuBattery app estimates I got one with a capacity roughly 20% over spec.
The next model they came out with would have been the one I’d have waited to get had I known they were working on it, though. The Tank Mini has basically the same specs, but also with a more usable 4.3" screen size, a second programmable function button, roughly 2.75x the battery capacity, a powerful flashlight/emergency warning light (used to also have a laser rangefinder, but they seem to have eliminated that). The battery longevity & extra programmable button would have been good to have.
ETA:
AccuBattery has helped me keep the battery in decent shape even after two years. Basically, the lithium-ion batteries prevalent in phones today will last several more years if you keep them charged in the middle third range (33-66%) as much as possible - doesn’t have to be every time, but the more you do it the more it helps. I’m typing this on my OnePlus 7 Pro that I bought used five years ago - it arrived with 89% of stock capacity, and just dropped below 80% a few months ago because I’ve been doing this. This model is over six years old, and still has decent life left in it (and I virtually never use the selfie cam, but its pop-up one is extremely cool & doesn’t eat a hole in my screen).But the Jelly Star does fit perfectly in the palm of my hand - even with my slightly smaller than average sized hands. It’s fantastic for subtle usage and easy to pocket. The feature list for something so small is unreal even two years later.
I like the tank in theory but the translucent green plastic is like a sirens call to me.
I’m more of a function over form type, so I keep a case on it & don’t even use the glyph lights on the back. Just more proof that it’s great for a variety of use cases.
I know a few dullards who’d go for the good old small smartphones of the 2010s, but this is even smaller! Does it run a standard smartphone OS, maybe Android compatible? How is usability with large fingers?
It runs full android. In fact, it’s way more powerful than a phone this size has any business being. You can even play (some) games on it with no performance drops at all.
Usability with large fingers is slightly less than normal, but honestly not bad at all. I use a T9 keyboard (pictured below) and it’s great and I type relatively quickly. I have the option of quickly switching to qwerty but T9 does the job well and it’s fun. screenshot
Edit: I did turn up the system font size, which makes things a bit tight sometimes, but honestly it’s very usable without doing that as well.
T9 keyboard
Do you have to tap multiple times for each letter?
Similar layout, but flick your finger in an orthogonal direction instead of tapping multiple times: https://f-droid.org/packages/es.ideotec.t16fling/ . I have been using it as my main keyboard the past year and it’s OK. No haptic buzzes though and it’s incompatible with one app (Aurora store, causes random crashes, have to temporary swap keyboards).
Nope, T9 is where you tap once on each number and it predicts what word you meant. There are only a few common overlapping words so it’s very quick. I actually did try several flick-based keyboards but the phone is so small, flick accuracy is almost worse than tap accuracy when only using 9 main letter buttons for me. It would often confuse vertical/horizontal flicks for diagonal flicks and it was a messy experience.
The keyboard I’m using is called “tappy keyboard”. I tried several open source ones, but none of them were able to fit the bill for this small screen quite as much as Tappy. It has many other layouts as well, but is not flick-based. (It does have swipe for some layouts)
Thanks! Good ol’ T9.
Took me a second for my brain to adjust from thinking you have some seriously large mitts
It sure came in a lot of packaging!
At first I thought, what have I done. Now Im completely at ease with the jelly 2e. Sometimes I have to get something off my old phone and it feels so cumbersome.
The Unihertz phones look pretty sweet. I watched a review of the one that has a full qwerty keyboard. Like, with buttons. Lots of their phones have IR emitters so you can control TVs and stuff.
