Small but not dumb

The cell phone industry is exploding. Not only in adoption but the size of phones too. Just take a look at all the phones out there with 4″ or larger screens. Samsung’s Galaxy S was already big enough at 4″ but good old Sammy is releasing an even bigger 4.5″ Infuse 4G phone on AT&T soon. Hipsters everywhere will have difficulty trying to stuff this phone into their skinny jeans. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are phones like the HTC Aria and the HP Veer that are getting smaller. Let’s take a look and see why some companies are pursuing smaller phones.

HTC Smart: the phone that started it all

Small phones have been around for a long time but they have always been dumb phones, or phones that don’t have advanced features like a web browser or access to downloadable applications. HTC started experimenting with small dumb phones back in 2010 with the HTC Smart, an ironic name given to a tiny phone with a dumb phone operating system. In a time when smartphone market share was skyrocketing, the HTC Smart wasn’t the smartest of moves and subsequently faded into oblivion.
Although the Smart flopped, HTC saw the need for cheaper, smaller phones and came out with the HTC Aria, which ran the full Android OS. It was practically free with a 2 year contract and was cute and pocketable. The Aria didn’t sell close to as many units as their other phones but it was still a solid handset.
HP recently released the Veer which continues the trend of small, pocketable cellphones with powerful operating systems. Too bad the internals of the phone are too slow and make the WebOS chug on the device. Hopefully someone will release a better compact phone in the future that doesn’t lack the features or speed of its bigger brothers. I think there is definitely a market for smaller, cheaper phones. They may be small but they’re not dumb (phones.)