Every time I see this it blows my mind how small they can make components now. Think back 20 years to cell phone antennae.
That's due to several reasons:
1. The wavelength of analog phones was much longer so a larger antenna was required in order to have sufficient gain
2. The transmitter on analog phones was usually 3 watts, and cell towers were few and far between. I used to have very spotty reception where I was and had to drive a couple miles to use my phone. I wasn't able to punt Verizon's land line until 1997 or 1998 when digital became available.
3. A large battery was required
Once the infrastructure was built up and TDMA (now GSM) was deployed, analog became less important so the analog transceiver power could be cut to under a watt, and antennae could be 1/8 or even 1/16 wave or not even ideally tuned since it was assumed that the user would be primarily using digital, and plans to sunset the analog network were in place (although it would take another decade to fully sunset analog).