Few months ago, I reviewed Melrose S9 tiny Android phone with 2.4″ display and 3G connectivity. I was captivated with the idea of super small smartphones and how it could be handy in some situations. Too bad my first pick didn’t end well. My Melrose S9 phone stopped working in just 3 days. Lucky I managed to claim full refund. Today I try my luck once again with another super small Android phone: Jelly Pro.

Jelly Android smartphone has 2.45″ display (240 x 432 pixels) and 4G connection. It measures 92.4 x 43 x 13 mm and weighs 74 gr with the battery. It is available in 3 colours: pearl white, space black and sky blue. As you can see from the photo, I choose the sky blue model. The CPU uses Quad Core CortexA53 1.1GHz. The regular model has 1GB RAM and 8GB storage; the Pro model has 2 GB RAM and 16 GB storage. For photography, it offers 2 MP front camera and 8 MP rear camera capable to record 1080p video. It can play AMR, AAC, AAC+, MP3, MIDI, WMA and WAV audio formats, 3GP and MPEG4 video formats.

For connectivity, this phone sports dual standby nano SIM cards. Only 1 of them can have 4G connection, the other SIM is basically only for conventional phone calls and text messages. It has Bluetooth 4.1, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n 2.4GHz/5GHz, built-in GPS, compass and gyroscope. It supports MicroSD card up to 256 GB, charges through standard micro USB port and has 3.5 mm audio port.

From software-side, Jelly Pro is powered by custom Android 7.0 Nougat. I find their version of Android is reasonably lightweight without much bloatwares. It scales down every display into super tiny icons and indicators. They’re not the most comfortable size to interact with, for sure, but they’re surprisingly usable.

Just like normal Android phone, it has access to Google Play Store. So far, all apps that I regularly use are compatible with this tiny phone and they are, again, usable. Apps take some time to load, but it’s just something we would expect from a low-end Android phone in under $100 category.

With only 950 mAh battery, the makers of this phone promises 3 days working time or 7 days standby time. This claim is a big lie. Even for standby, it survives maximum 2 days, and that’s with single SIM card and almost all notifications turned off. Another thing about battery is the fact that the battery was inside the phone when I first unboxed this product. I immediately tried to turn on the phone and failed. Plugged the phone into charging for 2 hours, still won’t turn on. I almost thought I got defective product until I tried to open the phone’s back cover and found that the battery is still wrapped in plastic and there is no information about it anywhere in the packaging. To make it worse, the effort of opening the back cover was rather tricky and I hurt my nail in the process.

Photo quality is mediocre. Sound volume is surprisingly loud for a phone that size.

When I installed a micro SD card, it asked me whether I want to integrate it into internal storage or treats the memory card as external storage. Of course if we choose internal storage, the card won’t be usable with other devices. During few weeks of usage, I found the false alerts of micro SD card undetected twice (the card was still there and I didn’t even open the back cover). Simply restarting the phone solved the weirdness.

I like the small detail about putting colored LED around the home “button”. When I charge this phone, it shows red LED and when it turns green when fully charged. I think that’s a rather nice place to put the LED indicator.

Other than its very unusual size, this phone has no wow factor whatsoever. Thanks to its tiny size, reasonable price and not-so-bad performance (assuming we set the right expectation from the first place), it qualifies as something worth to keep to say the least. If super tiny size is your main criteria in choosing a phone, get this one. Otherwise, there are many better phones out there.