Here comes the world's smallest 5G smartphone to date: obscure Chinese vendor set to debut minuscule mobile called Jelly Max, for minute mitts — but who will end up using it?

News
By
published

Unihertz makes a big splash with a small phone

Unihertz Jelly Max
(Image credit: Unihertz)

Chinese vendor Unihertz has announced the upcoming launch of Jelly Max, which it claims is the world's smallest 5G smartphone.

The company made a post on X and followed it up with a teaser on its website, but Unihertz has a history of making unusual smartphones.

The TickTock series, for example, has a customizable 1.3-inch touchscreen built into the back. We reviewed the TickTock 5G, and you can see what we thought of the company’s previous 5G device here. Its Atom devices are small and rugged (we've previously reviewed both the Atom and the Atom XL) and the Tank series of rugged phones come with features like built in DLP or laser projectors, and laser rangefinders. The Titan series are like modern BlackBerrys with physical keyboards. We reviewed the Titan here.

4-5 inches?

Now there’s the Jelly series - tiny phones, aimed at people with Lilliputian hands. Probably.

The 3-inch Jelly Star, launched in 2023, features a MediaTek Helio G99 processor and 4G connectivity and was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in just five minutes. Unihertz has used Kickstarter to launch other phones, so it’s possible that the Jelly Max may be given a similar crowdfunding approach.

From the teaser photo Unihertz released, which shows the Jelly Max resting on a six-row keyboard with function keys, it seems likely that the device will have a screen size of between 4 to 5 inches. It will be bigger than the Jelly Star, hence the Max name.

We can also see from the photo that the device has a fingerprint reader built into the screen and a camera at the top left. Beyond that, and the fact it’s a 5G phone, we know nothing else at the moment.

Pricing for the other smartphones that Unihertz makes tends to be reasonable. The Jelly Star, for example, is currently priced at $209.

The 5G TANK3 Pro, which is available to preorder, is priced at $649.99, but that’s very much at the top end for a Unihertz phone and it comes with a massive battery bumping up the price. Our best guess would be around $300 for the Jelly Max, but we’ll know for sure when more details arrive in the coming weeks.

More from TechRadar Pro

Wayne Williams
Wayne Williams
Editor

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.