Resurgence of small screen phones?
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This is Roundtable.

You're listening to Rant Table with myself He Yang. I'm joined by Steve Hatherly and Yushun in the studio. Coming up, while the world went big, a few phone developers kept things small and now the tide might be turning. Sleek, slim, and surprisingly powerful, these small screen phones are winning fans who miss one-handed text, texting, and non-bulky pockets.

Is retro cool making a long-term return? And need a boost to crush the week? Our special segment, Motivational Monday, is your ultimate adrenaline shot to kick things off strong. Our podcast listeners can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcast. Got a question that's keeping you curious from social issues to tech and everything in between? Let us take a stab at it. Email us at roundtablepodcast at

Emails are fine, but voice memos are always a tad better because we're a radio show slash podcast. After all, we'd love to share the world, your voice.

And now let's switch gears. Size matters, but maybe not the way you think. For years, phone screens got bigger and expectations got bigger. Phones tried to replace cameras, laptops, even your mobile office slash studio. But now the tide is turning. Turns out the bigger the screen, the bigger the burden. Pocket bulge, head...

or let's just say hand strain and accidental face slaps in bed. So now, yeah, have you experienced that too? What do you do? You slap yourself in the face? When you're lying in your bed and holding your phone, maybe a slip of your hand and then bam! And then you're like, face slap on my phone and it really hurts. And who wants a brick-shaped slap on your face? Oh, fair point, yeah. Okay. Oh, Steve.

I've never done that. What? You've got a good habit then. Well, I don't lie on my back with my phone right over my face. I think I prefer to lay on my stomach and look at it that way, which is not great for your shoulders. Right, so stomach slap instead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now small screens are staging a big comeback. Is it minimalism, nostalgia, or just our thumbs finally revolting? So, guys...

Gentlemen, are you team iPad in your pocket or the return of the one-handed swipe? I'm definitely on the small phone side. Oh, are you? Yes. I'm surprised. Really? Yeah. What if you had to give up your big phone for the small one? I'm for that kind of ease of operation and portability. And saying portability, I mean the weight and the size of the phone.

So the feeling of being able to hold and use your phone with only one hand is really satisfying, I would say. - Many years ago, my friend Jay, dear friend Jay, had a tablet that he could insert a SIM card into. And he used his tablet as his phone. And I remember the first time I saw him do that,

I told him, you look ridiculous. You look like you're holding a small table next to your face. From that moment on, I was team small phone, small screen. But what does that mean these days? What is a small screen? I don't even know what that constitutes anymore. What I do know is that if the phone is too big, too cumbersome...

I don't enjoy having that in my pocket and walking around and feeling that weight. And then you reach into your pocket and you have to spend like 20 seconds trying to dig it out of there because it's too big. So I prefer to have a smaller phone where it's in my pocket and I don't even feel it in my pocket. Well, great. And now let's have our in-house tech correspondent explain to us the small phone revival and also sort of

define for us like the bigger and smaller phones yeah as you guys understand steve just said the boundary line of big and small is becoming more and more vague i would say in recent years um back then when you call it small it could be just as small as maybe just your palm size yes it could be like 3.8 inch that's that big i'm

I'm not trying to confuse you with all of the numbers. I'm trying to explain you. So the definition varies between operating systems nowadays based on the research of small screen smartphones from research platform iMedia. In the iOS camp, small screen phones are considered to be around 5.4 inches.

That's the size of the iPhone 12 mini or iPhone 13 mini. That's roughly the length of a standard bank card. Think of a bank card. So with a feel in the hand that's slightly longer and narrower than the card. Yeah. I mean, just that description itself gives me a little anxiety because that's too small. Yeah, a bank card? That's tiny.

tiny right right so i just told you i advocate for the small phone the small screen but not that small but that that's only one definition right that's the ios definition what's the what's the android definition yeah so for android manufacturers the term small screen typically refers to devices with screen sizes around 6.3 inches that's about the height of a regular passport um

Maybe just a bit taller and also a bit narrower. Yeah, that sounds more comfortable, doesn't it? Yeah. Right. So actually, when we call it like small screen, it's all relative. Think back to the classic era when the most popular iPhone 4 or iPhone 5 had a 3.8 inch screen. Your thumb could easily just reach almost every corner.

corner on your screen. That was great. Yes, right? But now it's considered a super small. People don't love it anymore. And also, let's take a look at the Chinese market, which is a little different just by the results as the global market by the look of it. It seems like the retro, if I may say so, use the word retro, small screen trend is a

is making a comeback and actually since the later part of last year we've seen many Chinese phone developers coming up with their small screen options. This is from IDC data. So the small screen Chinese phone market saw its shipment volume increase by about 23% year over year.

Over half of consumers are actively looking at small screen models, and that's reflecting a shift in consumer demand, isn't it? And it's a trend of technological iteration. So there's an example. It's the Xiaomi 15, if you're familiar with that model. They sold over a million units in less than a month.

And that was faster than its predecessor. And these small screen phones, they're projected to account for over 15% of the high-end market in 2025.

And that's a significant growth driver. Take that into account with foldable phones too. It's still a smaller percentage of the overall market, but yet still growth within that market itself. Yeah, and you can see a lot of manufacturers are releasing that size of models. Small screen, Android flagship, 3D.

releasing the latter half of 2024, including models like the Vivo X200 Pro Mini and Xiaomi 15, as you mentioned before, Steve, and also Samsung Galaxy S25 and Oppo Find X8s, mostly around 6.3 inches of them. I was looking at a couple of videos in terms of why these phones

phones would be more attractive. Pardon me. And one of the things that they said in the videos, and I'm not mentioning any specific brand or model here, but just the fact that these smaller phones now can compete with the performance of

of larger phones a lot of the time. And still people, they might not want a huge phone, but they still want their phone to perform very well, right? And at least a couple of the videos I watched said that some of these smaller phones with smaller screens, they can still perform just as well as some of the bigger phones can. Question, as just an average person in the street, who knows nothing about phones,

smartphones, but the one that she uses. This kind of this is counterintuitive because now what we see is always saying that we have

migrated our lives onto our smartphones. And so many of you out there use your phones to play games. And we all watch videos using our smartphones, alongside all the other stuff that I suppose with a smaller phone can are perfectly capable in carrying those functions. But what about the two that I just mentioned? Do you can you experience a similar kind of

immersive time on your small phone? I don't think so. So what are those people using the small phone for and paying for one separately? That just sounds like a lot of ask.

Okay, if you want that kind of immersive and enhanced experience, what about having them on your tablet or iPad? Is it even bigger screen that you can even see more scenes or more image at one time? So that all actually depends on your needs. For most people, actually, if you are not using your phone to play maybe large scale games,

or are just handling every text-like communication and light entertainment, the processing power of current smartphones is already more than sufficient, actually, and often even succeeding their actual needs. Yeah, and remember those statistics that I gave you from China, right? Representing 15% of the high-end market in 2025. We're not talking about a wholesale market.

shift in a trend towards smaller phones. It's still representing a smaller proportion of the market. So the people who are using their smartphones for gaming or many hours of video watching per day, they might not be included in these statistics that we're talking about. But there is a significant amount of people that do prefer to have a smaller screen. The

of usability of using one hand, right? Some people, when they drive, they have trouble doing things with their phone. They want to just do it with one hand, but they can't, right? So that's annoying. There's also been advancements in battery technology that has addressed previous limitations there too, right? They have silicon carbon negative electrodes that allow for larger battery capacity in the same space.

or even smaller sized devices. So you have these extra strong batteries that you didn't have before. Then you have these high performance processors that allow the same amount of performance in a smaller amount of space, right? And it's a challenge, isn't it? When you make a smaller phone with a smaller screen, you have to...

The batteries are bigger in bigger phones, so they tend to last longer. So how do they improve that? But they did improve upon that. So making those improvements, I think, has helped to increase the market share. That's also one of a lot of selling points of these smaller phones. And I remember one example is the domestic manufacturer called OnePlus. They were releasing this kind of a small phone

foam flagship they're trying to tell people it's the performance of these films will not decrease if

the phone size is smaller. So, you know, the size doesn't mean the performance of the phones. And maybe even sometimes they will especially design for a smaller size of phone with maybe better battery life and also chip performance. Yeah, cameras too. Exactly. Yeah, right. The cameras are getting better. Oh, yeah. And also Chinese manufacturers are known for having cameras

world-class, state-of-the-art photography features on our phones. And it can easily beat international competitors in that regard. Maybe it shows that Chinese users really love to take pictures. I am not an expert on that. But also, this shows that, at least in the Chinese market, the small screen phone is

Has been around and it's probably here to stay. And there's one big phone developer that we didn't mention, but I think it's lurking in the corner. That is Apple. And, well, Apple's strategy is probably more global because it is thinking about global sales as a...

as part of its strategy. And it's phased out, the smaller phone, a little while ago, I would think. So are these small phones actually doing that well globally? To be honest, the latest smaller phone that Apple released was 13 mini. And now we are having iPhone 16 now. So that's probably... They are not launching any mini version of their phones for...

three generations now, which means they've already phased out that production line. So in fact, under the mainstream trend of increasing smartphone screen sizes, the sales of performance of some past small screen models was less than ideal, actually.

Data from market research firm CIRP, for example, the iPhone 12 mini saw a 50% production cut the year after its release, accounting for only 6% of total iPhone 12 series sales. And in the first quarter of 2022, the iPhone 13 mini made up just 3% of iPhone 13 series sales in the US, which is

is considered one of the reasons that Apple may have discontinued the Mini line. And other models like the Samsung Galaxy S23 and Xiaomi 12 also had a tough time finding success in the market. So what do you see as...

Is there a rosy future for the small screen smartphone market? When you have a product that does account for a certain percentage of the market,

but it doesn't account for a large percentage of your company's sales. It's kind of difficult to convince the company to keep producing. Sure, there's a demand with a small percentage of consumers, but if it's not contributing largely to the overall revenue of the company,

then it's hard to expect, you know, Apple didn't want to continue with that product line. Well, there's a reason. There's a reason, yeah. There's a reason for that, right? It's niche, I think. I think it's, you used the word retro before. I think there's a group that wants that old school feeling of,

But it's not the large representative group of smartphone users. I wonder if this is something that the phone makers in this country have been leveraging on such a huge market that they're saying, oh, the small screen phone apparently can express more individuality because when everybody else is using the big one and then you have the small one. And in China, really, this phone market is very...

diversified in the sense is trying to capture every different taste of people. And if you really have that many people buying phones with such a huge population, then supposedly even if you live off that very niche market, your little company is okay. I really don't know.

I remember when I started on this show about 12, 13 years ago, we were chatting about smartphones. And naive and young as I was, I never thought that the smartphone market would see saturation one day. But here we are. We're now talking about a lot of Chinese people actually carrying two phones. And then...

Also, like smartphone sales aren't really going up the way you used to a few years ago. So, yeah, the average phone. I don't know if this is just a statistic. Excuse me. It is true for China. But the average lifespan of a phone is about two years.

years or so this is from I found this on Fast Company it's an old article it was from 2018 but I think it probably still applies today yeah two year lifespan for a phone that basically makes it disposable doesn't it so if you're buying something that expensive that has a two year life cycle um

that isn't great for the environment, then you're going to have some people who want to make better decisions for the environment with their purchases. And I think this applies here with these smaller phones too. Coming up next, Motivational Monday. What do you guys have for us? Hmm.

Today, my Motivational Monday quote is "There should be more than one way to be successful." I saw this story from a heartwarming comic series by an artist named He Xiaohe. So in this fast-paced society, we often find ourselves feeling busy and exhausted. Sometimes even in the middle of the night, we are too tired to sleep.

You fear every moment of letting go and worried that time is being wasted, but you should know birds don't fly non-stop and bears

hibernate through the cold winter, right? Your hard work, your anxiety, your unease, they are all valid and understood, but no one can keep running forever without ever getting tired. And the energy you gain from relaxation is just as valuable as the effort that you put in. And being able to rest well may also be a kind of success because there is more than one way to be successful. - Very nice. - Thank you very much. What about you, Steve?

When my wife and I were away, we were out watching some live music one night. And there were some people up dancing. And my wife and I were dancing at certain times too. But there was one couple that was quite old.

And they were having the time of their life, dancing with each other. They were dancing like there was no one else around. And it kind of reminded me that though the definition of fun may change as you go through your life, the opportunity to have fun never goes away.

And you might have had fun doing something when you were in your 20s that isn't fun for you when you're in your 70s or something. But that doesn't mean you can't find different ways to have fun. We're still kids at heart, no matter how old we get. And watching that, I don't know where they were from, but boy, they were good dancers too. They were having a great time celebrating each other, celebrating the music. And I was just reminded, never stop trying to have fun.

And that's a wonderful reminder. All right, let's talk about power. Not the flashy type, but the kind that comes from surviving, growing, and daring to begin again. Lin Yilian, or Sandy Lamb, is living proof that age doesn't limit greatness.

She's not just a mando pop and canto pop legend because of her flawless vocals or her 40-year illustrious career. It's her fearless reinvention that sets her apart. From urban love ballads to experimental and electronic sounds, her music is always evolving, layered, daring, and deep.

And she's just held her live concert in the Beijing Workers' Stadium on May the 24th.

What a great success. I mean, for her, I like to go a little bit more into her journey. After divorcing at 38, she didn't retreat. She rewrote her story. She carved out a new path, becoming a voice for independent women everywhere. And now at 59, she's still commanding the stage, hitting notes most singers half of her age wouldn't dare to reach, doing it live at home.

high altitudes in the rain with full fire as she continues her national tour rounds. And her song Guilin or Reset is a gem from 2018. It's more than a vocal flex. It's a statement, a mindset, a mission. It says...

Burn the script. Be your own plot twist. Reset your life again and again if that's what it takes. Because the truth is, every Monday, every sunrise, every quiet moment, you get another shot. It's never too late to start over.

Never too late to become the person you've always wanted to be. And Sandy didn't just sing it. She declared it three times over. Reset, reset, reset. A battle cry for anyone ready to begin again. And you're not too late. You are right on time. Here's Sandy.

Lin Yilian's Guilin, Sandy Lam with Reset. And that brings us to the end of today's Roundtable. Thank you so much, Steve Hatherley, for returning to the show and Yushun for being with us all this time. Thank you for tuning in. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Roundtable China. I'm He Yang. Enjoy the music and we'll see you next time.