The iPhone 15 mini is dead but someone wants to take its place in your pocket

Before the iPhone 12 mini arrived everyone was very excited. They wanted a 5.4-inch iPhone. But nobody bought it.

Before the iPhone 13 mini arrived, everyone was excited all over again. They still said they wanted a 5.4-inch iPhone. But nobody bought it.

Now, a startup involving the people behind the Pebble smartwatch wants to have another try at making a small phone. But will someone buy it?

Small but mighty

The new phone comes in the form of a project called the Small Android Phone which, admittedly, isn't going to be an iPhone. But it's going to be small, as the project's name suggests. And with the team involved it's difficult to imagine this not turning into something impressive.

That team spoke in an interview with The Verge and Ben Bryant, one of the team leaders, confirmed that things are moving. Bryant worked with Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky previously and says that the phone's aim is to be able to "take good photos."

That, we're told, means that we can expect a camera around the 50-megapixel mark. But in terms of the actual phone — the bit you hold — that'll be “a nice soft slab that’s very high quality, very nicely put together, very solid feeling, and that just has very soft details that feel really nice on your fingers.”  That's according to Alex De Stasio who has done industrial design for GoPro in the past.

There's still no name for the phone, and we don't know how big the screen will be other than it'll be less than 6.1 inches. Processing power could be handled by last year's Qualcomm flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1.

All of that sounds good, but the phone is set to sell for around $850 which is a fair chunk of change for something that's expected to be small. $999 will get you into Apple's best iPhone, the iPhone 14 Pro, today. But that has a 6.1-inch screen, so really, should we even compare the two phones?

Maybe not. But we're still not convinced that there's a huge market for mini phones in general. And considering Apple didn't make an iPhone 14 mini, we aren't the only ones.