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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

Interesting indeed! I usually struggle with the general size of the icons and the width of inputs being so short that only a dozen characters fit on there. What are some advantages that you experience with the 4s screensize?

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Mostly single-hand maneuverability of device, is what I find most useful.

I'm pretty dexterous person with medium-sized hands, and weight and form factor of 4S allows me to easily fetch it from any side, flip it, access any button, and manipulate any point on screen while still keeping weight center in palm of my hand, not fingers or, god-forbid, fingertips.

I sort of could work with Samsung's SII, but SIII I couldn't tolerate.

As the sibling said, I immensely value the single-handed usability. Even the 5/5S screen is approaching too big, because my thumb cannot reach to the far corner of the screen.

If the rumours of the iPhone 6 having a bigger screen are true, I really hope they don't gimp a smaller version to have less grunt. That's my main gripe with small-screen android phones - they're technically inferior to their physically larger counterparts and marketed as the midrange option.

I am a big guy with big hands.

And yet, anything bigger than 4 inches is too big for me. I want to use 1 hand. I want to toss it on my pocket and forget about the thing. If I need a tablet, I will get one.

Smaller phones fit more easily into pockets. Also, anecdotally and in my experience, they have better battery life.

I actually find that a bit surprising. I would expect with a larger form factor one could fit a bigger battery into the phone (like an iPad has much better battery life than an iPhone). A longer charge would be more motivation for me to upgrade my phone to a larger size than a bigger screen.

Indeed, my iPad lasts days longer than my iPhone.

The Galaxy Note line is well known for its battery life. Note that screens are 2D, while batteries are 3D. So battery size can increase faster than screen size.

Possibly this is due to the larger screens being primarily Android, which had/has worse power management than iOS. I'm out of the loop on the current state of the relative power management between the two, so this may have changed in the last year or so.

But anecdotally, my friends who carry Android phones keep their chargers nearby in their purses/briefcases.

Current Android devices with smaller screens almost universally have less powerful hardware. A slower CPU, slower GPU and smaller amount of RAM will consume less energy. They also tend to have lower pixel densities, which usually mean higher light transmission (with LCDs) and therefore less energy spent running the backlight. There's also less area to illuminate.

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