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Comment by sudosteph | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for taking initiative on this! As a 5'5" woman with small hands, I haven't had an android phone that I could use with one-hand since my Nexus 5 (which I used for 5 years straight). The current android flagships are unwieldy even with two-hands for me, and it's been just a quality of living downgrade ever since my Nexus 5 broke. I'm not into apple products myself, but I know many other women swear by the iphone mini since it's the only phone that fits their hands.

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I'm a fairly large person (185 cm and decent sized hands), but I prefer the mini, and in my Android days used the Xperia mini. I don't particularly want a large phone on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately it seems that it's a niche that doesn't generate enough revenue to get broader support.

I got the feeling, that niche markets could be lucrative if the middle man (retail) is left out. The internet is a very powerful tool in this regard. It brings together customers from all over the world.

I actually think the loss of retailers is part of the problem: without places to go and touch and play with things, we've become increasingly beholden to reviewers and shrill opinion factories to try and evaluate things. Niches, especially niches that rely on non-spec driven evaluation, wither and die.

5% of people who buy an iPhone think that the mini is a good choice, but literally every review or discussion of it is positively hysterical about battery life. If you haven't picked one up and handled it, you'd think that it offered no merit and was going to shut down 2 hours into the day.

A recent discussion on this at my work was centred around the notion that large phones don't generally fit in women's clothes pockets (when they have pockets), as the pockets tend to be smaller. There seems to be an inherent sexism in phone design (and clothing design, and many other things).

Overwhelming majority of women I know always carry a purse. I have yet to see a phone that doesn't fit into the smallest purse.

Maybe that's because women's clothing tends not to have pockets?

That is very culture dependent, I think. I don’t know a single woman who usually carries a purse! (I live in Norway. And maybe my acquaintances are unusual. But still.)

This is really interesting! I live in the UK. I know exactly one woman who doesn't carry a purse and to a big degree it is due to an injury.

Obviously, these are tradeoffs decided by the capitalistic (pseudo)majority. It’s not sexism. (And I have hands smaller than your average woman.)

I've been mostly wearing men's pants for the past few years to get past the pocket problem (skinny leg men's pants fit me pretty well and still have OK pockets). I'm probably in the minority though, most women just carry a pocketbook.

I'm a tall man with large hands and my S10 is uncomfortable. Just ordered an iPhone 13 mini after finding out that the Pixel 6a, my last hope for a small Android phone, will be big. This will be my first iOS phone despite 10+ years on Android. The situation is idiotic.

What did you think of the Pixel 5? It's only 0.5cm taller and otherwise more or less identical in dimensions.

I used a friend's once and it seemed fine! Taller height is generally more manageable. It's the lack of one-handed keyboard usability that irritates me the most with modern android phones, and that's more of a width thing.

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