In the end, I got an S23 which receives (presumably) four years of major revision support plus another two years of security patches, which is still much more than Sony is willing to promise.

I had an Xperia Z, which I was supposed to be able to patch with custom roms. Too bad that while that generally worked, Sony locked the camera to its own software which then fell back to a much inferior mode, meaning you had to decide between updates or shitty pictures, which was a deal breaker for me and had me update to an S10e back then.

The Xperia 5 is a skinny 6.1" & many consider it to be a small phone option in 2024.

I know. It's still too big. I was this close to switching to apple just for their iPhone mini range, but that got discontinued as well. My S23 is something like 6 or 6.1 as well. It's only usable because Samsung has a better one handed mode than default android or Apple.