Someone Is Building a Phone Smaller Than the iPhone 13 Mini. The Battery Pops Out.

The last genuinely small phone Apple sold was discontinued in 2023, and the people who owned one have not stopped complaining about it since. Every year a rumor surfaces that someone is bringing the category back. Every year nobody does.

This week a small company called Enough put out photos of a dummy unit and a full list of target specifications for a phone with a 5.3-inch screen. That is smaller than the iPhone 13 mini. It also has a battery you can pull out with your fingers, which no mainstream flagship has offered in about a decade.

There is a catch, and it is a big one: the thing does not exist yet. It needs a Kickstarter campaign and roughly 20,000 buyers to become real. But the timing is more interesting than the hardware, because a European rule landing in February 2027 was supposed to make the removable battery part of this phone completely unremarkable. It probably will not.

What the Enough Phone Actually Is

Enough first surfaced in late June with little more than a concept and a name. What arrived this week is more substantial: photos of a physical dummy unit and a spec sheet the company describes as targets rather than promises, which is the honest way to phrase it before a crowdfunding campaign opens.

A few of those entries deserve a second look. The 720p LCD is the one that will bother spec sheet readers most, and it is almost certainly a cost decision rather than a taste one. At 5.3 inches, 720p works out to roughly 320 pixels per inch, which is sharp enough that most people will not see individual pixels, though it will look duller next to an OLED.

The camera choice is more interesting. A single 50MP sensor that sits flush with the back is the sort of decision a big manufacturer cannot make, because a flat back reads as cheap on a shelf next to three lens rivals. On a phone this small it is the right call, since a camera bump on a 63.8mm wide body eats a meaningful share of the surface.

The thickness is the tradeoff nobody should skip past. At 12mm, this is roughly 50 percent thicker than the iPhone 13 mini it is chasing. Some of that is the battery door. A phone you can open is a phone with a seam, a latch, and a frame stiff enough to survive being opened.

Why Small Phones Vanished in the First Place

The story people tell is that manufacturers stopped listening. The numbers tell a duller story, which is that the people asking for small phones were never going to be enough of them.

Apple actually ran the experiment, twice, with real money behind it. The iPhone 12 mini sold well under a fifth of what the standard iPhone 12 managed. The iPhone 13 mini did worse: roughly 5 percent of iPhone 13 family sales, against about 51 percent for the base model. Apple killed the line and has not looked back.

Three things stacked against the mini, and all three still apply.

The first is that a smaller phone does not cost meaningfully less to build. You save a little on the display and the battery and nothing on the processor, the modem, the cameras, the software, or the certification. Apple priced the 12 mini only $100 below the standard 12, which left buyers wondering why they were paying nearly full price for less phone.

The second is that the phone replaced the things a small phone is bad at. Video, maps, reading, gaming, and split screen work all improved with size, and those are now the bulk of what people do on the device.

The third is battery. A small body means a small cell, and battery anxiety cancels out the pleasure of one handed use faster than anything else. That constraint is only getting sharper, because at the opposite end of the market Chinese flagships are now shipping past 7,000mAh on silicon carbon chemistry. A 3,500mAh phone in 2027 is going to look thin next to that, no matter how efficient the Dimensity 7500 turns out to be.

The Removable Battery Is the Real Story

Strip away the size and what is left is a phone whose battery you can replace without a heat gun, a suction cup, or an appointment. That used to be normal. It stopped being normal when waterproofing, thinness, and glass backs won.

The European Union decided to reverse that. Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 requires portable batteries to be “readily removable and replaceable by the end user,” and the requirement applies from February 18, 2027. The details are stricter than the headline suggests.

Read that and you would expect every phone sold in 2027 to open up. It will not, because of a carve out that has been the subject of an argument all summer.

The Loophole, and Why It Probably Holds

The regulation allows a device to skip the removability requirement if its battery is durable enough by a defined standard, retaining at least 83 percent of original capacity after 500 full charge cycles and at least 80 percent after 1,000, in a device that also carries an ingress protection rating for dust and water.

Those thresholds are demanding, but they are not out of reach for a well engineered sealed cell, and they describe roughly the design target a modern flagship already aims at. If a phone qualifies, the battery can stay glued in.

The counterargument from repair advocates is worth hearing. Official guidance has been clear that an IP rating on its own does not buy an exemption, and that manufacturers are expected to engineer around the problem rather than cite it as an excuse. There is even a working proof: Samsung’s rugged Galaxy XCover line carries an IP68 rating with a battery that lifts out in seconds. Gaskets and mechanical latches solve this. Adhesive is a choice, not a necessity.

Which is why a phone like the Enough matters more as a demonstration than as a product. The companies actually shipping serviceable hardware are still the small ones. Fairphone’s latest model earned a perfect repairability score and finally went on sale in America, and it did that as a niche brand, not because regulation forced anyone’s hand.

The Part That Should Worry You

Everything above assumes the phone gets built. Crowdfunded hardware has a bleak record, and phones are the worst category in it.

Roughly 9 percent of all Kickstarter projects never deliver anything at all, and that figure covers card games and enamel pins alongside consumer electronics. A smartphone is orders of magnitude harder: it needs chipset allocation, modem certification per carrier and region, regulatory approval in every market, an Android license, and a software team willing to ship security patches for years after the campaign money is spent.

None of this makes Enough a bad actor. Publishing target specs and dummy photos before opening a campaign is more transparency than most crowdfunded phones offer. It just means the correct posture is interest, not a preorder.

Who This Is Actually For

If you want a small phone today, the honest answer is that you buy a 6.1 or 6.3-inch flagship and accept that “compact” now means narrow bezels and low weight rather than a genuinely tiny body. The Pixel 10 Pro and the base Galaxy S26 are the phones people mean when they say compact in 2026, and neither is small the way a 13 mini was small.

If what you actually want is less phone rather than a smaller one, that is a different product, and it already exists. We looked at the Light Flip, a 5G phone built specifically to do less, and the people happiest with that device were not chasing screen size at all. They were chasing fewer reasons to pick the thing up.

The Enough Phone is aimed at a third group: people who want a full Android phone, in a body that fits a front pocket, that they can keep alive by swapping a battery instead of replacing the device. That is a coherent product. It is also a product whose entire value depends on a company that has never shipped one before delivering software support for years.

The Bottom Line

Two things can be true. The Enough Phone is the most interesting small phone announcement in three years, and the odds of it reaching your hand in the form described are not good.

What makes it worth paying attention to anyway is what it exposes. A 5.3-inch Android phone with a battery door is not technically difficult. Nobody large builds one because the math on volume does not work, and the regulation that was meant to change that math left a door open wide enough for every flagship to walk through.

Watch the campaign when it opens. Read the update commitment before the spec sheet. And if it does ship, the interesting number will not be the screen size. It will be whether anyone can still buy a battery for it in 2031.