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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

I'm righthanded and I usually hold my phone in my left hand so I can do clicking and typing with my right hand, but I often do basic scrolling with my left thumb.

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I'm a man with typically sized hands. I can barely do anything one-handed on a phone. Phones are so big they basically require two-handed operation for me. Like you, I typically hold it in my left hand, so I can use my right hand to tap stuff.

I’m a guy who’ll leave his laptop on the floor and will bend double from a chair to use it, on the floor, because I have forgotten I can pick it up. I am ergonomically insensitive.

Anyway, I use my phone in my left hand, my right hand, or both, pretty much equally.

Get a ring for the back of your phone. Makes one handed use much easier.

There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis, and I plan to keep it going until Apple caves and makes a sensibly sized phone again.

There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis…

You, me, and my wife. I’m just waiting for my phone to hit 79% battery health so I can take them both in for battery replacement.

It’s gotten to the point that I frequently get asked, “what phone is that”. I imagine because all phones are the size of aircraft carriers now, and an iPhone Mini really stands out.

Will the do a batter replacement for a 13mini? i just cracked my last new-in-box fore battery issues.

You can do it yourself[0].

0. https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-13-mini-battery

Word of caution, it seems kind of difficult, I had Apple replace my iPhone 12 Mini and they broke the screen in the process (so got a free screen replacement too), so seems a lot harder than it used to be, think I did it myself back in the 3GS days last time and seems its way more brittle today.

I've replaced multiple iPhone batteries (just not this model), and the great thing about the iFixit kit is it comes with specialized tools you need and great instructions.

Indeed! And I bet Apple technicians have even better training, tools and reference documentation, despite that they broke my screen anyways! So I'll stick to my warning to ask people to be careful, seemingly really easy to break the displays in the process.

If you have Apple Care, I assume Apple will. They’ve done it before, but not on something this old. If not, there’s always DIY or 3rd-party.

They will still do it if it's below 80% on Apple Care, or $119 if you just want to do it out of plan.

Then I guess there is me with my iPhone 12 Mini. Replaced the battery some months ago, Apple techs broke the screen, so got a free new screen too. It's starting to get very slow though, every update it gets worse. I can feel that just running Spotify and Waze over CarPlay is starting to be too much, add in sending live location via Telegram at the same time and the phone almost grinds to a halt.

Hey count me in, I am on iPhone 12 mini, so I guess you didn’t count 4 because of that ;)

I must be at least the 5th 13mini user.

I'm vainly hoping to my SE 3rd gen. is the last smart phone I need to own.

god, I have a 12 mini and I don't know what I'm going to do when it dies. my attempts at finding a vaguely modern name-brand android phone that's a similar size have concluded in zero phones and a sense of overwhelming dread

Vivo X300 and Oppo X9S Pro are both very compact(6.3") and still pack great cameras and insane battery life thanks to the Silicone carbide batteries.

I don’t think you realise how massive the two phones just suggested are: https://phonesized.com/compare/#1863,2767,2760

(For reference, I would really like something a little bit smaller than the Mini, but there’s nothing remotely modern that exists.)

Correct, they are still bigger than the mini. But compared to what seems to be the industry standard of 6.8" they are positively miniature.

They’re considerably bigger than even the normal non-Mini iPhone. They’re only just smaller than the iPhone 17 Pro Max: https://phonesized.com/compare/#1863,2767,2760,2738,2736

You're comparing wrong models though? X9 and X300 Pro are both much larger than the phones I mentioned.

(I've just noticed you also used wrong models in your original comparison - while both phones are larger than the mini, the difference isn't as large as your link suggests)

The iPhone is normal phone size width and depth, but it's meaningfully shorter than just about everything else. It doesn't sound like much on paper but I've always found it adds up once in a pocket. (All dimensions height x width x depth, in mm, rounded up to the nearest mm)

* iPhone Mini: 132 x 72 x 8 (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/111877)

These two alternatives are noticeably larger:

* Vivo X300: 151 × 72 × 8 (https://www.vivo.com/in/products/param/x300)

* Oppo X9S: 157 x 74 x 8 (https://www.oppo.com/en/smartphones/series-find-x/find-x9s/s...)

In fact, they're more like the size of the full size iPhone, which, if you're sticking with your iPhone Mini because the iPhone is annoyingly large, means they're too large.

* iPhone 17: 150 x 72 x 8 (https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-17/specs/)

They're also bigger than the base Samsung S26. They're not small even in comparison to other Android phones.

Base S26 is almost exactly the same size though?

https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=14456&idPhone2=...

The X9S Pro is half a milimeter taller.

Sorry, I was looking at the non-pro variant by mistake.

This is totally not "vaguely modern name-brand" but I've been using the e-ink Mudita Kompakt and it's more or less the same size, but a bit thicker. It's Android but no Google Play Services but probably doesn't tick your box

Same, on a 12 Mini right now, been looking for phones (any OS) that has similar size for maybe the last 2 years, and while some Xperia models have come close to the right size, everyone is still aiming for "bigger === better" it seems. Can't wait for the pendulum to switch back to smaller phones again...

Another 13 mini user chiming in. I’m 6’3, and think it’s ridiculous how big phones are. It reminds me of the automobile and tv industry though, where you’re sort of forced into buying something obnoxious if you want to get the better features.

I agree that phones are too big. I refuse to switch to two-handed phone use. I used the Palm Phone PVG 100 with a 3.3" screen as long as I could, but software got too slow and battery-hungry, and my now-wife was annoyed when my phone would die halfway through our text based conversations lol. Used a chunky 3.5"er (Soyes S10Max) for awhile but it died after a year.

Now I use the Motorola Razr 2025. 90% of the time I just keep it closed. The outer screen is 3.6" and a square, but the screen doesn't extend all the way out if you keep the hinge on the side. It's kinda heavy at 6.6oz (compared to the Palm Phone's 2.2oz), but with a ring, it's super easy to use one-handed. And it has battery life and compute power to handle today's unnecessarily compute-heavy apps. You can also split apps in half when it's open so you can just use them on the bottom half of the phone.

Pictures:

https://www.middleendian.com/phone.jpg

https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

Main disadvantage is that when it's closed, you only have a "selfie" camera as the back camera is facing you and the front camera is inside. So it's hard to quickly take pictures of things I see outside (usually funny birds). Other annoyance is that if you open the phone, use it, and then close it, the outer keyboard resets to the default keyboard and you need to "change the keyboard layout" to get it to use your preferred keyboard (Microsoft Swiftkey in my case)

On the topic of the thread, I am left-handed. When I tried to resize the keyboard while it was closed, it constantly glitched out. Could not figure out what was going on until I rotated it 180° and tried it with my right hand. Resizing worked perfectly lol. Something about coordinates I imagine. I hear left-handed phone users used to have their horizontal photos come out upside down until someone figured it out.

On the other hand, I'm also a Dvorak user, and the Dvorak layout in SwiftKey has the delete key on the left, which is super convenient. Shown here: https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

I can't find it now but I'm sure I saw some people cutting samsungs in half to get something similar. The only one I could find was this: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/A_Modified_zFlip...

I lack the skills, time, and nerve to try it with my own phone lol (and wouldn't want a keyboard). As much as I miss the Palm Phone, this is an acceptable compromise.

I have a regular pixel 10, and I can palm a basketball. But I can't use this phone one handed.

I’m 196cm tall and can’t use one handed. It is ridiculous.

Bring back normal sized iPhones.

Why do you mention your height but not the size of your hands? Maybe you just have small hands?

I assure you, I’m don’t have tiny hands like Trump.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Same here, I suspect the majority of people with average to small hands could never really one hand phones (with a good enough screen size) in the first place so it makes less difference to them.

If you have an iPhone, enabling reachability is very nice [1].

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...

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