Unihertz Jelly Star Review: There’s nothing like this gorgeous tiny Android phone

Have you ever missed the old days around the turn of the century when smartphones were designed to fit in your hand and actually be usable with that hand? In 2004, the i-mate JAM was the talk of the town in the tech world for being small and powerful. That was one of my favorite smartphones ever. Don’t you wish there were some modern smartphones that weren’t giant slabs of the touchscreen but could still run all the latest software? I do. You can still get dumb-phones that are designed for ergonomics and usability, but the choices are slim when it comes to high-end Android or Apple smartphones. Thank goodness for the Unihertz Jelly Star! This phone is actually comfortably usable with one hand due to its jelly bean shape and small screen while also being very capable in all smartphone functions (as well as a few that are no longer possible on certain other flagship phones.)

Pricing and Availability

The Unihertz Jelly Star is now available to purchase. You can place your order using the links given above. This compact smartphone is available in the US and Canada, the EU, the UK, Asia, the Middle East, and most major markets across the globe. You can also choose between two colors; red or blue.

What’s in the box

The small box is well packed and includes the Unihertz Jelly Star, USB C data/charging cable, AC USB adapter, and a lanyard. Mine included an extra AC USB adapter separately outside the box, but that was an accident since this is an unreleased early model. I like that a lanyard is included, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to attach it as the lanyard thread is too big for any of the holes in the phone. It turns out Unihertz will make a case for the phone that the lanyard will attach to, but the case does not exist yet at the time of this review.

Design

• Gorgeous jelly bean design with transparent plastic and bright LED notification lights
• Extremely ergonomic; unbelievably comfortable to hold in one hand
• Extremely small and pocket friendly

I love the clear plastic casing that shows off the internals while also having a gorgeous red tint. This phone looks very unique! You can see a little metal pill-shaped extrusion that houses the camera, flashlight, and fingerprint sensor. The capacitive fingerprint sensor works great; much better than some of the new in-display fingerprint sensors. I quick touch of that spot on the back will instantly unlock the phone. It’s super easy to feel for too since the raised piece and capacitive sensor have a distinct feel. You don’t have to look for the fingerprint sensor location like you do with those hidden in-display sensors that most modern flagship phones have.

On the right edge, the red button at the top is the power/sleep button. You can double press it to launch the camera right away. The black button below that is a programmable hardware button. Yes, you heard that right! I LOVE seeing this! Back in the turn of the century almost all smartphones had programmable hardware buttons (and more than one in many cases). Why are these so good? Well, with hardware buttons you can actually feel their locations without having to look at the device. You can locate them with your fingers. By having the buttons programmable, you can choose the function or functions that you want the hardware button to carry out. This is a HUGE factor in improving ease of use.

By default, the Unihertz Jelly Star’s programmable button is set to call recording with a single press, LED light switch with a double press, and flashlight with a long press. It also works as a camera shutter button when the camera app is active (which I also love).

You’ll also see a red shiny piece on this right edge of the phone. That’s the SIM card tray and we’ll show you something awesome about that a little later. Then there’s the USB-C charging port which is also good for data transfer like loading the device with MP3 music.

The bottom edge only has some speaker holes, a microphone hole, and a little screw that must be holding everything together.

On the left edge we’ve got more of that gorgeous smooth rounded plastic along with a volume up/down toggle switch.

The top edge looks mostly barren, but there’s two holes there that put this phone above many other much more-expensive, much-larger flagship phones. The big hole is a 3.5mm headset jack which gives you a reliable audio & microphone connection to the phone. It works great with Google Assistant and FM radio apps too! The little hole is a consumer grade infrared port that lets you use the phone as a universal remote control.

The Unihertz Jelly Star is incredibly comfortable to hold in one hand. It just fits perfectly. Holding larger phones feels so awkward and cumbersome by comparison.

Above is a look at how the Jelly Star compares in size to a Xiaomi 13 Ultra on the right and a Nokia 3300 dumb phone on the left. The Jelly Star is surprisingly so much smaller and so much more powerful than the Nokia dumb phone!

There are some very bright decorative LED lights on the back inside the clear plastic. They can be set to flash while playing music, or to indicate notifications, phone calls, or you can just turn them on manually.

There’s a brightness control for the curvy lights on the back and they can be really bright, even outdoors in direct sunlight.

The display itself doesn’t get bright enough outdoors though. It can be very difficult to see in direct sunlight, so you may need to find some shade in order to use this outside.

What’s that in the picture above? Yes, that’s right! It even has a MicroSD card slot for storage expansion! This tray can be used for either two Nano SIM cards if you want two phone service activations. Or one MicroSD card and one Nano SIM card. The phone itself already has 256Gb of storage, which is a really good amount, but maybe you want to put an extra Terabyte of storage in there. No problem, get one for cheap on Amazon and pop it in.

Whenever you hear another phone manufacturer like Apple or Samsung say that there’s no room for storage expansion slots or 3.5mm headset jacks in their phones, that excuse seems very unconvincing when you see this Unihertz Jelly Star packing all of that into something much smaller than what those other guys are doing.

Camera

I kind of expected the camera to be pretty terrible on this phone since I was originally equating it with dumb phones like the Nokia 3300. It turns out that the 48 megapixel rear camera is actually not that bad! It’s not the best camera in the world, but it’s really not bad. The camera software doesn’t have many fancy bells and whistles like filters or HDR or whatnot and there’s only one camera as opposed to the array of lenses that we see on other larger phones… BUT… there’s one huge advantage for photographers in this camera software, and that’s the fact that it can output to RAW DNG format!

The RAW DNG format gives you the straight sensor data without any destructive JPG compression or processing that you normally get by default. That means you can have full control over the post-processing and we all know that 50% of good photography is in the post-processing.

With the RAW DNG files, if you copy them to a computer (I like to use the old File Transfer Protocol using the FTP server in Material Files since FTP works on everything) with a larger higher quality screen, then you can edit these files in advanced RAW photo editing software like Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, RawTherapee, Darktable, etc. You COULD install Adobe Lightroom mobile on the phone and edit the RAW files there with a similar amount of flexibility, but trying to do that on a tiny 3″ screen is going to be painful, so I highly recommend moving them to a desktop computer where you can really see the pictures. While the rear camera is technically 48 megapixels, it’s a quad-bayer sensor which really outputs to only 12 megapixels. That’s still ok though, the RAW files are nicely editable afterwards. If you zoom in by about 400%, you’ll see that the photos do tend to have a lot of noise, but again with RAW I have the ability to use a much wider variety of de-noising tools and even some AI model-based noise reduction tools that aren’t available on in-phone software. In very low-light photos, as you’ll see in the examples below, the noise gets very pronounced. In other words, you’re much better off shooting in RAW format with this phone; the JPGs are not particularly well processed with highlights being frequently blown out, but the RAW files provide quite a bit more flexibility in getting more detail out of the highlights and shadows that the normal JPGs don’t provide.

On the rear camera, sometimes the auto-focus isn’t very fast, so you have to pay attention to the AF circle indicator on the screen to make sure it finishes focusing before you move the phone. A few times, I pressed the shutter button and then walked away thinking the camera took the picture instantly (as it often does), but instead I got photos of the ground or feet because I didn’t wait for the auto-focus to finish focusing. So I’ve learned to hold steady until I see the photo show up in the little view gallery icon in the corner, that way I know the picture I wanted to take was saved.