I bet you think that the title of this article is a bit strange. I bet you think that I have started losing my mind if I think that mobile phones are in any way going back to the 1990's. At least you probably think that if you were around in the 1990's and old enough to have a mobile phone yourself and you remember what they were actually like.
We have come a long way since then and it is really amazing to see how much these little gadgets of ours have actually changed since the days of yuppies with brick sized monstrosities that only made phones calls and did nothing else. Of course I am not suggesting that mobile phones are going to be limke that again. That really would be crazy. But you see the whole trend of mobile phone evolution during the 90s was towards smaller handsets. Everyone wanted small and that was the only game in town. Hardly suprising considering how big they were to begin with.
Then people started to forget about size, and started thinking about cameras, and radios and mp3 players and now apps. But today we have started to reach the level where manufacturers have already put pretty much everything anyone could need from a mobile phone onto their top handsets, so they are looking for other things to set their product apart from the crowd, and size may just be that thing.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini is a good example. It is the first truly tiny smart phone with all of features of its bigger counterparts. The Xperia X10 mini may just be the start of a new trend. You can see it with other gadgets too, such as the ipod micro. And I am sure other mobile phones will follow where the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini has led.