The context for my (rhetorical) question is the repeated claims about hordes of people just waiting to get a smaller phone.
As I have maintained throughout the thread, there is not a whole lot to support that take - whether the predicted volume is 2000, 6700, 12000 or 0.1% of global smartphone sales. If not even the 401 people who voted for a 5" display show interest, why would Jolla go ahead with a 5" phone?
Exactly. As I’m sure you can see, I’m questioning the value of a single poll in a wishlist thread about a not-yet-existing phone as an indicator of sales volume for yet another undefined phone.
You acknowledged the existence of the poll, however, denied it to have any real world meaning. Instead, you push this 3% statistic. The poll is about the Jolla Phone/Mini, those 3% are about one of the iPhone Minis - an unrelated device by a much bigger company that hardly compares to Jolla.
I read the thread before my first reply. I guess I have to confess that I didn’t read the linked article before tho. I assume you read that article. Did you notice that Apple sold multiple small iPhones, not just the Minis? The SE seems to have been much more successful (24M for 2nd Gen SE that came out half a year before the first Mini). Could you imagine that the iPhone Mini didn’t fail because it was too small? (Also I’d like to point out that even as a “failed” iPhone the Minis were more popular than most Android phones)
It is NOT the global market share for small phones. It is the share of iPhones that are iPhone Minis, but those are not even the only small iPhones. There was also the iPhone 8 that sold well for a 3 year old phone and the iPhone SE. And at one point (tbh there is also a part where it says both minis sold a total of 3%) it says both iPhone Minis have a market share of 3% each. The chart lists them separately with what could be ~3% as well (so ~6% for both?). The iPhone 12 Mini was more successful in the previous year (so we could learn from that that releasing 5 small Jolla Phones might backfire but nobody suggested to make more than one and nobody asked for them to be made every year)
The following article lists the iPhone SE as the 9th most sold smartphone of 2022 (the same year the other article was about) despite being small. And if we compare market share, only the 1st and 2nd are more than twice as successful as the SE and the only Android phones in this list are at 4th and 10th place:
Here’s another one listing the top 10 in shipping numbers in 2020 with actual numbers:
the second, third, seventh, and tenth positions were also occupied by Apple with the 2020 iPhone SE (24.2 million), iPhone 12 (23.3 million), iPhone 12 Pro Max (16.8 million), and iPhone 12 Mini (14.8 million)
None of those look as much “doomed to fail” as the 3% applied without context that you are pushing while dismissing the results of the poll that was literally asking what the community wanted
As opposed to the totally not flawed assumption that the 3% of iPhones being 13 Minis predict sales volumes for an unrelated company operating on a much smaller scale years later?
And only 110 people liked Jolla’s poll. If not even Jolla, a company that is actually able to produce a phone and that asked what the community wanted instead of just forcing their opinion on us wasn’t able to get that many likes. You demanded 2000 in your 1st post and you didn’t think that’s unrealistic? Or that that attitude might make you less likeable? Contrary to what you might think, people give you a like if they like your post (i.e. agree with it fully and find it helpful).
You didn’t make a poll. I haven’t seen you ask anyone what they wanted. You came up with that yourself and acted as if you were the voice of the (small phone) community. And they simply didn’t agree with you.
You proposed a smartphone that is worse than the upcoming Jolla Phone in several aspects:
It is glued together, which means it is not repairable (which might not be legal because of recent EU-repairability laws)
It doesn’t support TOH for above reasons
on the bright side: it might be water-proof but only if it gets twice as many likes as there are forum members or reaches 10k pre-orders (which probably means that it needs to be redesigned before production can since that has to be a design consideration from the start other than TOH which can be designed and produced separately)
No FP reader for some reason (according to the footnotes it’s space related)
Less storage that is possibly not expandable because maybe there’s no space for the SD card slot
It might be single SIM (but only if there’s no SD card slot) or eSIM only (does SFOS even support eSIM yet?) - I don’t disagree with the “we can’t have 3 slots” part but a combined SD/SIM slot + eSIM would be more versatile while not costing much more space (and more people might agree with that)
In addition to a lower battery capacity, which, to be fair, might be unavoidable – instead of 5500 mAh it’s only 3500 mAh (did you make that up?)
And all of that for a pre-order price (probably batch#1) of €779 – €280 more than the Jolla Phone and €80 - €180 more than JP’s estimated retail price
There is a difference between people not wanting a compact smartphone and people not wanting a bad smartphone that happens to also have a smaller screen
You looked for the most pessimistic number you could find (the worst selling iPhone out of multiple small iPhones), stripped it of any context (according to you these 3% are equal to 6M sold devices in one year but you don’t add that to your equation because you wouldn’t get the results you wanted), applied it to unrelated numbers and got a result that might be mathematically correct but is void of any meaning
Here’s an example: If we only look at the market share of iPhones among iPhones and ignore total numbers, the best selling iPhone was the iPhone 2G (before the iPhone 3G every iPhone sold was an iPhone 2G – that’s 100%). Now for comparison we look at the Jolla C2: between 2024 and end of 2025 it was the only smartphone Jolla sold (that’s also 100%). But do you think they are comparable in that way? The 2G sold 6M devices – the same number as iPhone Minis. Depending on context it’s 3% or 100% or it could be anything else.
If Jolla made a pre-order campaign we could easily find out but instead of working on a realistic concept that we could pitch to Jolla, we have a thread filled with people trying to convince us or Jolla that this would be a total failure and nobody wants that anyways to make sure it never happens. I don’t really get why. No-one wants to take your big phones away. No-one says Jolla should only or just primarily produce minis. We can coexist. And from a business standpoint it might make sense for Jolla:
Jolla will make the next smartphone in 1 or 2 years. If the next JP is the same phone with slightly newer spec, it will fail – not because nobody wants it, but because everybody who bought the first already has one and because everybody who wasn’t convinced by the 1st won’t be by the 2nd
@ngt I really appreciate you interest in this topic, thank you! Let’s push it later together when Jolla will be finished with the current campaign. If they do not respond then, then we will make our own poll. But of course the official one from Jolla can get a lot more traction.
As for @jojomen, he was very sarcastic in that post where he suggested specs, he admitted that. For some reason he is pretty dismissive about this idea.
So the Jolla campaign has fortunately reached 10k! Congrats to all who ordered it! I hope the team will be able to pay attention to this topic in a couple of months.
The team now has a tremendous effort to make the phone work from the software side, vendors, parts, orders, assembly, work on new software features and maybe even more since there will be more people onboard, while also keep updating and fixing a lot more devices like C2 and Xperia line.
I’m not working at Jolla, but if you think that now they have time to chill and think about new devices while they will be dealing with J2 related things for at least this whole year, you are probably going to get disappointed.
You certainly heavily underestimate Jolla capabilities, because Unihertz managed to release the new Titan 2 Elite just half a year after the end of Titan 2 kickstarter campaign. And it happened with 7 times less (!!!) dollar value preorders.
I guess, but it is not like they have to invent something new here. We are talking about the same version of OS for a slightly different device from what they have already released.
It isn’t about Jolla’s capabilities. They are perfectly capable when provided sufficient resources to make something remarkable and well-enjoyed by the community.
But if you look at how “well” the C2 launched, you’d be more hesitant as well. Whether it was just issues getting the device to boot, Bluetooth sound issues, pin-code issues, MMS issues, network connectivity problems. In my case, I reported the camera app freezing when attempting to record video in October of 2024 and it took until August 2025 for it to be fixed. So 10 months.
Will the J2 be a repeat of that? Probably not. Hopefully not. But there is absolutely no way they are (or should be) focusing on yet another device beyond their existing workload of Xperias, C2, and J2. Early positive reception to the J2 is insanely important. This is a “flagship” device for them. They gotta get it right.
Unihertz is a Chinese manufacturer, with their own manufacturing plant, and god-knows-how-many employees. They make use of the Android Ecosystem, don’t support and update their devices for very long, and sell their devices in numbers Jolla can only dream of. Nobody knows how big their production runs are, but you can be sure, they are big enough to rectify the development and production of custom hardware.
Jolla is a rather small European manufacturer, renting a manufacturing plant, has limited staff, which also develops their very own operating system, supporting and updating their devices for years to come. Their production runs are (for the industry) rather small, and most component manufacturers laugh them out of the room if they ask for custom parts made in the small batches they need. At least at reasonable prices.
I’ve also wished (and wish) for a smaller phone. But I think there is no way Jolla can afford to even think about a second model right now. They need to get the J2 right and prove that they have a solid, reliable and usable platform. If they are able to do that, they may have enough resources for custom parts (like said smaller screen many people, including me, are dreaming of) in the future.
Until then, they’ll have to keep using off-the-shelf parts. And there was (and most probably still is) simply no feasible smaller screen readily available to them.
@CLMA31 ‘extend product range’ itself does not mean mobile phones at all. It means any kind of soft-, hardware or even services. B.t.w. ‘the higher the expectations, the deeper the fall’.
