4 inches
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
The continually disappointing thing about the iPhone coverage has been people who dismiss things as not needed until Apple gets around to implementing them.
Personally, I guess my hands are bigger than Curtis's, since I've been using 4.3" phones since 2010, and it's really not a big downside at all -- but rather, the iPhone's screen size is, honestly, still too small for me to consider. Thinner/lighter/smaller isn't always better for everyone. One size fits all doesn't.
EDIT: the other oft-overlooked part of this discussion is te frequency of one-handed use. For me, at least, I'm usually already using both hands if I'm doing something more than passively reading/watching something. I'd be interested to know if this is different for others, so that any inconvenience to one-handed use is actually a major inconvenience to your primary use of the phone.
Additionally, Apple recognizes the need for different form factors with pretty much every other portable device they make, from the iPod to the MacBook lines and, reportedly, soon even the iPad. So why not the iPhone?
"Every area of the screen is reachable, after all (unlike many Android phones with 4-inch+ screens)"
He said "many", not "all", and "4-inch+", not "4-inch".
Most of the high-end Android phones on the market are larger than 4 inches (in many cases, significantly so), and he says the iPhone 5 - at 4.0 - is barely acceptable.
> This is an example of one of those design decisions that you don't usually notice until you see someone doing it wrong. It's one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products.
It's one thing to lay out an argument for a design, it's another to claim that anyone arriving at another conclusion (as Apple eventually did), is "doing it wrong".
The criticism here seems reasonable. He went from discussing a "huge downside of larger screens" to saying that a bigger screen "hugely" improves the experience. Oh, and previously the smaller screen was "one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products." Manufacturers with larger screens were "doing it wrong."
The entire post is just Dustin Curtis trying to rationalize his jump from claiming that bigger screens are too big to claiming that they are a huge improvement (now that Apple does them).
Also the phone screen he was comparing against (S II) was only 0.8 inches larger, at 4.3 inches.
In fact, larger phones make it much more difficult to text while driving and that might be a good thing.
I've been observing people using phones in the wild and anecdotally a frequent one handed use case is while eating, which, if you're eating alone or on the go, is a really good time to use it. I've seen a lot of big phone users forced to get their lunchtime emailing, checking, texting, etc, out of the way before eating, while lots of iPhone users can get their things done while they eat. Why hobble yourself for .3 inches?
Being an iPhone user myself, it's kind of strange to think that almost any time I want to do something with my phone that I basically need to be handcuffed to it: brushing my teeth, holding onto a rail in the metro, drinking a cup of tea, referencing something while cooking, holding a bag, writing something down, etc. Is the extra real estate worth the forced modality?
Also having different UI contentions doesn't mean someone else is doing something wrong. We port games from iOS to Android at Apportable (YC2011) so we deal with converting concepts every day. Neither is better or worse.
Tablets will move it to the bottom in whatever orientation you are in which good but the issue with that though is that the screen dimensions change and I can't tell you how frustrating that is in games and changing their OpenGL projections on rotation. Not only do you have to handle rotating your content for the orientation, but then you have to adjust for the screen size virtually changing sizes. For some games and apps (like ZenBound) this breaks things by moving the virtual center point of the screen.
Irrespective of where on the bottom row it is, it's still more useful than the top left of the iPhone 5.
Any?
While the Galaxy Nexus has onscreen navigation controls now (and the Nexus7 followed suit), both the One X and the Samsung Galaxy SIII have dedicated capacitive back buttons "off screen". On the OneX the button is in the normal place (on the left) and is oddly (but in keeping with the SII) on the right on the SIII.
Also, since Jelly Bean I can't say I've ever had an unexpected result by pressing the back button. As far as I can tell it always does The Right Thing since they got their guidelines formalized, at least with the couple dozen apps I regularly use. I have to say on balance I've been more annoyed with iPhone apps lacking necessary navigation buttons on some screens more than Android back button inconsistency.
Now, placement is a different issue and we can argue why these designers chose to put them where they put them. But it has nothing to do with the button being hardware versus software.
Two of the most common actions in apps on the iPhone are to tap the top left and bottom parts of the screen. To do this on iPhone 5 for many users will require continual readjustment of the phone in their hand. For me, this is a showstopper and actually makes the iPhone 4S I own now feel better designed since the hardware size is in tune with the layout of the software. The new iPhone is shoehorning a UX that works well on a smaller screen into a larger one and it fails.
A nice benefit for us left-handed people though.
Put simply, the issue is that no one actually has the "common case": the probability that someone's hand span exactly matches the "average" or "mean" of the distribution is approximately 0.
Instead, we have to first discretize the variable into a histogram and then assign a common case afterwards. The way you normally might do that is with standard deviations. However, now you have to ask "what is the variance".
With hand size, it is quite obviously very large: again, my girlfriend's hand is to an iPhone 4 as my hand is to a Galaxy Note, and people generally do not go around calling either of us freaks of nature with regards to our hands (I actually have fairly effeminate hands ;P).
I will therefore repeat with emphasis: the idea that people make these reachability arguments as if hand size is universal down to silly half-inch increments is downright insane. However, I will now show some data.
http://www.steinbuhler.com/assets/images/HandSizeChartNewWeb...
This chart comes from a piano company measuring hand span for purposes of optimal piano sizing (concentrating on people whose hands have already finished growing). (Their conclusion, btw, was that they needed to sell a few more piano sizes.)
Now, this is full hand span; however, as your hand is fixed in the middle by the thing you are holding, you won't get this full spread, but I would easily argue that you will get at least half of this spread in that case.
The result, as you can see, is that there is a very very large range of reasonable values: hands are really not that common; you might think you have a common hand, but you really don't: hand span varies by numerous inches.
(There are multiple factors for this, of course: it isn't just hand size; you also have to take into account flexibility of joints, muscle strength, etc.; even if everyone's hands were the same size, the ability to reach the upper-corner of a device would vary a lot.)
I will then argue that even if you want to just attack a lot of people, and still fail for numerous others, you need to at least be making a device for women and a device for men: the difference between genders is really striking in that chart.
However, most people don't argue things like this: they accept that there are massive variations in the size of peoples' feet, hands, torsos, and pretty much every other body part, and this is why we don't just sell one-size-fits-all clothing.
Apple, FWIW, would not only be selling a single size of jeans, they would claim that they had optimized the size of the jeans to fit some optimal size, and their user community would then defend them with diagrams that show variances of less than half an inch for how perfect the fit is.
I hold a phone across my fingers, tucked nicely under the top of my palm. I can reach across a 4" screen without a problem.
Also, when I'm holding a phone vertically, I don't typically only use my thumb - I use my other, more dexterous, and more "free", hand.
Wait...maybe the people this applies to are busy with their other hand?
After seeing some of my friends struggle with the 5, I'm not going to upgrade (my 4S works just fine :)
I wonder what's more common: holding the phone in your off hand or your dominant hand?
I disagree with this, I think navigation should be at the top because you use them infrequently. What you do do frequently is scroll, and navigation being on the bottom gets in the way of trying to scroll.
However, this is just my own personal observation. I'm not going to write a blog post on how it is a scientific fact that navigation is better when on the top.
Edit: Appears to have been corrected, but point still stands.
People have different sized hands - there's no such thing as a perfect sized phone.
I have a Galaxy Nexus with a 4.65" in screen and I use it one-handed all the time in both my left and right hands, sometimes even while cycling in central London. It comes out of the pocket easily, I've never dropped it, ergonomics are great. I don't know what kind of pixie hands some of these pundits have, but I am 6' tall with a slender frame and pretty average hands.
I can't help but feel that a lot of people making this point about optimal size are drinking a bit too much of the Apple koolaid. Hey, I love Apple stuff in general, but that doesn't mean I subscribe to the view that their way is the one true path to perfection and everything else automatically falls short. People put this stuff up on a pedestal and then start justifying every aspect retroactively. Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe the iPhone originally had a 3.5" screen because that's what was economical at the time rather than that god handed specs down to Johnny Ive on Mount Sinai?
I'm fairly sure, but uncertain, that I did this with my iPhone 3g prior to getting the nexus. With everyone discussing single handed use of a phone I wonder if I'm in a minority of people who use their phone this way. It just strikes me that using my phone one handed would only really happen when my other hand is occupied carrying something, and in that case the reduced ability to reach corners of the screen seems to be a side-effect of using the phone sub-optimally.
It's obvious that people hold phones differently, use phones differently, and have different sized hands. It's also obvious that some people like buying phones with bigger screens. Why does everything Apple do have to be justified or rationalized as some kind of great and insightful design choice?
Because 4-inch is the upper limit and Apple got it right again.
The "size hasn't been a problem for me!" posts in this thread are hilarious. I'm quite certain the iPhone's target demographic includes a lot more women and girls than are represented on Hacker News.
4 inch telescreen bellyfeel doubleplusgood