Jelly the smallest Smartphone
Camera on the back, display on
the front, home key down below. Pretty standard. So, what makes this one special? Well, this one fits in your coin pocket. I'm Mr. Mobile and this is Jelly. (funky electronic music) Beyond having the weirdest name since the
Veer, Jelly is tiny. It's on loan to me from the folks at Gadget
Labs, who claim it's the world's smallest
4G Android smart phone. And if small is
what the folks at UniHertz were going for, well, mission accomplished. Similar to its predecessor, the posh MicroX,
Jelly is under a half inch thick, and it
masses just 60 grams.
That means the
battery is tiny, too, at under an amp hour. And heavy use will run it dry in about half a
day. But it is removable so you can
carry more than one. And the display it
has to power is also small, less than
two and-a-half inches across. Jelly does
bring some cool stuff to bear despite its size, like 4G LTE, dual SIM slots, microSD
expansion, and Android 7. My unit has the March security update, and
Google Play Services are here, too, so
you can download your favorite apps from
the Play Store. But when you're building
a phone this tiny, compromises are
unavoidable. There's no fingerprint sensor,
it chargers via older Micro USB cables,
and the spec sheet is entry level, with
some telltale corner cutting in a few of the onboard apps. (chuckles) It's still got a headphone jack,
though.
What's it like to use? Actually a lot of fun. Broadly, it's no surprise that phones this
small are possible. I mean, after all, we have had wrist watch
phones for years, now. Jelly is interesting because it's tiny and
it's a fully fledged phone. You swipe between home screens to see your
apps and widgets, turn it sideways to
watch Netflix, and put it up to your ear
to take calls. Those are surprisingly
clear on my end, though callers say I
sound a little muffled. And when it
comes time to type, well, it's difficult, but not as much as I expected. gboard's predictive text has gotten good
enough that it usually corrects me
correctly. The best part of the whole
thing? No super human hand stretch is
needed to get to the notification shade.
Praise Jelly! The worst part of the whole thing is the
camera. There's no way around it, it's
terrible. Especially when you put Jelly's
photos up against the same shots taken
with a Google Pixel.
There is a
front-facing camera, too, though, if you want to test out Jelly's beauty mode, or try
to get a video call going on Skype. Just keep in mind that apps are slow to open
on this hardware and many have trouble
scaling to such a small canvas. That's easy to forgive when you think about
the price point. Jelly is a Kickstarter project launching April
30 and early backers will be able to
snag it for about 60 bucks. And even if you're late to the party, it tops
out at $79. So it's being pitched as a sometimes phone,
for workouts, or a backup communicator, or
a phone for kids. It's definitely not
for tech geeks. I couldn't put up with
the slow performance or the jiggly buttons
or the cheap glossy finish. But some
folks still really want a super pocketable phone, but also need the functions of a smart phone.
For them, Jelly might be an okay fit at a compelling price. Just don't expect it to excel at anything
beyond being tiny, and you stand a
pretty good chance of making your
big-phone-toting friends...jelly. Are
you a fan of tiny phones? Drop a line in
the comments.
Specification:
1.1GHz Quad-Core
1G Ram & 8G Rom
Android 7.0 Nougat
Dual Camera
Dual Sim-Card
2.45'' TFT LCD Screen