While the cell phone companies are racing to make their phones faster and productive having bigger and high definition display in a much compact body, another company doesn’t care about all this and want to take us back to much simpler and cheaper times when cell phones were only used for calls and text messages and it was all about making the phone as small as possible.
FutureModel, a Japanese mobile start up company recently launched a small credit card sized phone known as NichePhone-S that runs on Android. The device looks like a cheap pocket calculator and is available in black or white color.
It is the smallest phone you can get that runs on Android. However, it is not even near to what an actual Android phone can do, this device can pretty much just make calls, send text messages, record voice memos, play audio files, tether a 3G data connection and has Bluetooth which you can use to connect your favorite wireless headphones.
Niche Phone-S does not have a touch screen display, instead, it comes with a T9 keyboard.
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The Niche Phone-S weighs around 38 grams and the size of the phone is only 90x50x6.5 millimeters.
Although it runs on Android 4.2 but you can not install any Android apps on the device. The software is heavily customized and minimized so that it can run on this small little cell phone. It is not clear how the actual user interface will look like, though the promotional video by the company shows something very simplistic.
The Niche Phone-S is powered by a small 550 mAh battery which is more than enough for this tiny device. It sports a MediaTek MT6572A processor from 2013 and has 256 megabytes of RAM. The phone is said to provide 3 hours of talk time and 72 hours of standby. It also has a nano SIM card slot.
According to the company, the phone will first launch in Japan on November 10 and will cost around 10,000 yen (or $88 USD).
I literally don’t know who is going to buy this phone or why someone would buy this phone as you can get other phones like the updated version of Nokia 3310 in the same budget. These devices certainly are not going to find a mass market audience, but I must agree that I would definitely wanna take a look at this small, creative and weird piece of technology.
