[General Questions and Answers] Nazo:
So I need a bit of an unusual sort of suggestion. I have a SGS3 and I absolutely love it -- for the most part. To me it's just a bit too big. I have an upgrade coming up pretty soon now and was kind of wondering if there was any way I could try to get something roughly equal hardware-wise, but a bit smaller. Unfortunately, smartphones (I started to say Android, but even Apple decided to do it even though that was the one and only thing I thought was good about them before) are getting bigger and bigger. Most of them now are just plain too big for me altogether in fact. I personally believe they'll all go smaller again in a few years when people start to realize that bigger phones are more inconvenient to use, easier to drop, and so on, but that could be years before people catch on...

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out if in the meantime there's anything I can consider that might be at least somewhat close in hardware. I'm even kind of considering a downgrade if it's at least really close since a good clean setup of CyanogenMod makes it unnecessary to have the hardware people think they need now. That's one caveat though: CyanogenMod is not an option. I am never going back to stock. I also need official CM support. There are too many problems with unofficial ports like lack of updates (CM does nightlies with semi-stable monthly builds in addition to their stables for instance, so you can get updates at least once a month even if you want to keep it fairly stable, in unofficial ports it's not uncommon for the person working on a build to just get tired of dealing with it and stop after a short while even) and I just don't want to deal with all that. This narrows the options quite considerably I realize.

And more to narrow it: I'm on Verizon in the US (and I want to keep 4G LTE functionality btw. Sometimes I'm forced to use my phone for real Internet access as my own home connection goes down and 3G just plain sucks if you do more than only check e-mail and visit Facebook.) This, unfortunately, means a bunch of international phones aren't an option though since they don't work with our crappy providers and their ridiculous network limitations.

Anyway, I've held a model of a SGS4 Mini and it just felt absolutely perfect to me, so I'm aiming for somewhere in that sort of range. Mostly on the width (which is about 61.3mm/2.41in according to the Wiki. My main concern with it is the screen is of a notably lower resolution (I have 720p, it is 540p.) I have really good eyesight, so I actually want a high DPI believe it or not. Still, I'm planning to keep my SGS3 around as a multimedia device and a backup if I do upgrade (it can still do everything else after all) so I'm sort of considering it. I really don't particularly want to go below 720 if I can help it, but that may not be possible. One thing I'm not clear about though: is the SGS4 Mini in the US different from the International model like with the SGS3? CyanogenMod supports the SGS4 models, but it only actually says "International" on the SGS4 Mini unless I'm just not looking in the right place or it isn't 100% official yet (as I understand, they only just recently managed to unlock the bootloader on the 4 and 5, right?) Does anyone know about that? I'm still a bit torn on the screen, but everything else about the SGS4 Mini is great. Including especially how well supported Samsung phones are by third parties (for instance, there are probably literally thousands of different cases I can choose from for my SGS3 and I found one that was perfect for my rather unusual needs in this respect thanks to that by modifying a belt clip.) The CPU is even a bit better than my current one, though that's hardly a big deal.

Are there any others I should look at? I want something semi-even with my SGS4 in capabilities, but it doesn't have to be exact and a little lower is ok. It's hard to say on the CPU, but at least 1GHz. On the RAM, probably at least 1.5GiB, though I'm not sure if maybe 1GiB might actually be sufficient -- people are going overboard on this and I know not nearly as much as they think is needed. (I have the 2GiB model, so I haven't run into any limitations, but I'm not convinced it actually needs that much on a clean system setup like I have and am willing to bet that 1.5GiB would be perfectly fine.) I also kind of want to stick to Qualcomm SoCs if I can since they actually seem to actually have standards on analog audio output which is truly rare and they can even drive my somewhat audiophile headphones well with good sound when so many embedded devices tend to not be able to handle their higher needs (I guess current since these are low impedance.) But as long as it's at least decent I guess it's ok since, again, I plan to keep the SGS3 around rather than selling it or something. EDIT: Oh yeah, and a MicroSDHC card slot is necessary.