Yeah, I'm in the market for a new Android phone right now and phones seem to be going through a late-50s auto industry "new larger size!" phase.

And the pitiful internal storage coupled with the lack of expandable storage. It's still much more convenient for me to sync music to a card than to wrangle with the various cloud services.

Wifi + sftp client have helped me manage my ebooks on my phone, copying them from my Linux box. You ought to be able to do something similar, just get on your home wifi network and pull over your music.

It's not something I particularly care about. I'm not even using all of the 8GB on my current phone.

Some (like me) consider that an upside.

The problem is that there is no alternative. All high-end phones are gigantic. Same for all Nexus phones.

The Droid RAZR i/M disagrees with you.

Locked bootloader, so it's not an option. Also, only Nexus series phones are really worth it these days.

The "Developer Edition" is unlocked, and I agree on the second point. Unfortunately, you're at the whim of Google and the consumer market, which apparently demands large phones.