And they're cool. There's almost nowhere I can go now without throwing a little tiny phone in my pocket, and I don't have to bother anybody because it's on vibrate. In restaurants, bars and conference rooms, small, sleek phones accomplish what BMW Z8s do on the road, turning heads and eliciting oohs and aahs. Often a tiny phone will work for only 100 minutes or so before it runs out of juice. That's a major problem, said Muzibul Kahn, senior director of product management and engineering at Samsung.
Battery life is a key factor holding back the development of smaller phones.
As it is now, the battery accounts for about a third of the bulk in the v8160, Motorola's tiniest offering that's a little bigger than a Matchbox car. Another issue is the phone keypad. If phones get much smaller, the keypad simply will have to go away, in favor of another interface for interacting with the phone. Samsung came face to face with that a few months ago when it began testing its watch-phone in Korea. The futuristic gadget, slightly larger than a normal watch, works on speech recognition - spotty speech recognition, Kahn admits.