I feel like I see an independent low-noise phone project like, every 3 months. Clearly there is some latent demand here. I wonder why the big players (Google, Apple, Samsung, HTC) haven't made a big-corp product for this market.

I am always reluctant to jump on with these independent ambitious projects. The first version is understandably rough, and the company seems to fold before they get to a second or third version.

But maybe advances in manufacturing in China are making high-quality, small-batch products like this more tractable?

I feel like I see an independent low-noise phone project like, every 3 months. Clearly there is some latent demand here.

I don’t know - it feels to me that this is evidence that there _isn’t_ sufficient demand to sustain a successful product like this.

Big corps were the ones to move away from Blackbery en masse towards a BYOD system. Before that, Samsung and Nokia both had a series of keyboard phones running Windows Mobile 6 or SymbianOS. I had the Samsung Blackjack II in 2008.

Same reason Acura stopped making small cars like the Integra/RSX: costs scale more slowly than revenue as car size increases, so selling to the small car market segment results in unearned potential profits — even if the small car segment is a majority, it’s better to make a higher profit per unit on fewer unit sales if your most primary goal is to min/max labor/profit.

(Small phones, unlike small cars, also have costs in UI development to maintain their form factor’s OS support, which can create an additional pressure to withhold devices for a viable and profitable market.)

> I wonder why the big players (Google, Apple, Samsung, HTC) haven't made a big-corp product for this market.

Because it impacts ARPU. It's really not that difficult, you're the product being sold.

> Clearly there is some latent demand here

No, there demand is negligible. It's just typical hacker news people who want to suddenly become productive Silicon Valley trope hustle style, or people who want to change their damaging habits in a day, so instead of uninstalling TikTok which takes 15 seconds to do, they will spend money a separate device.

Although the keyboard may be useful.