Jelly 2 takes a second stab at the smallest 4G phone crown

It wasn't too long ago since Unihertz burst into the smartphone scene with an outlandish solution to the smartphone distraction problem. Rather than offering a dumb "no phone", the Jelly packed a fully functional Android phone in a tiny box no bigger than some palms. The startup is now back with the Jelly 2.0, offering more hardware features while keeping the size almost the same, staying true to the goal of making smartphone use less addictive or even attractive.

The Jelly 2 is an upgrade in every sense except the size. Almost everything that can be improved has been without drastically changing the spirit and core design of the literally handy 4G phone. That's mostly thanks to how far manufacturing has come in the three years since the first Jelly launched and how more affordable lower-end components have also become.

The screen is larger, for example, now at 3.0 inches and with even more pixels crammed. Unihertz has also upgraded the internals with a MediaTek Helio P60 processor, 6GB of RAM and 128 GB of UFS 2.1 storage, and double the battery at 2000 mAh. Pretty impressive specs for a tiny phone, definitely. It even comes with Android 10, which will hopefully be upgradable to Android 11 in a few months.

Despite the diminutive size, the Jelly 2 won't be lacking in features, at least if you compare it to most entry-level Android phones. The 16 megapixel rear camera and 8 megapixel front camera are no laughing matter for a phone this size. It even has room for a fingerprint scanner on the back.

The Jelly 2 has only been on Kickstarter for two days but not only has it gone way past its $50,000 goal, it has already crossed the half-million mark. It could only be a matter of time before it bags Kickstarter's most-funded campaign again, perhaps proving that there is indeed a market for this kind of phone.