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Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

I actually wish I could purchase an iPhone 6 in an iPhone 4s form factor.

I like being able to hold the phone with one hand and do everything I need with my thumb. This seems like one of those trends thats driven by the manufacturers need to position themselves rather than customer demand.

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On the contrary i really like the iphone 6 plus. I was concerned with the size and at first it looked ridiculously large but it's funny how fast you get used to that. A few weeks later i look at my old 5" android phone (which i initially found to be too huge as well) and it seems tiny. Sure, the size is not the most convenient in some situations, but it's so much better in many others that i use my Laptop a lot less for casual web use. For the first time i also enjoy typing on a mobile device because of the larger keyboard and the battery will last a day no matter what i throw at it. I was very skeptical at first but would not go back now.

From my own experience and from talking to my friends, people with a 6+ seem to be happy with it, and people with the 6/5/5s keep trying to convince me that it is too big and that they couldn't get used to it. It's a bit of an odd phenomenon overall, but I'm pretty interested in how cell-phone sizing plays out over the next couple years.

Oddly, you didn't gain any space by going from 5" to 5.5" since the iPhone 6 Plus only has a 1080p screen. (Statistically, that's what you likely had on the Android phone since most 5" Android phones have 1080p displays). I'd be curious if you find a 5.5" 1080p screen more productive than a 5" 1080p screen. I'm using a 5" 1080p screen now and upgrading to a 2,560 x 1,440 6" display (Nexus 6) primarily for better web browsing on the go.

I don't find that surprising. The resolution of the phone may be the same, but the physical dimensions of the keys on the keyboard (for example) are larger.

True. But, I had the same issue with the original Note. It was only 720p. Yeah, it had a big screen, but it had no more pixels. And a 5" screen seems plenty for using a touch keyboard with its terrible auto-correct (talking about both Android and iOS here). Granted, I'm one of those that would still really like a physical keyboard to text and email faster, they just don't make them anymore.

The iPhone 6 Pius actually renders a screen resolution of 2208x1242 (which is then downsampled to the display 1920x1080 native resolution):

http://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/iphone-6-screens-demystifie...

It may report and draw 736x414 CSS pixels when drawing web content, but it's still only 1920x1080 real pixels and usable space.

I actually find it a lot more productive, at least for web browsing where resolution does not really matter because you use different UI scaling by zooming anyway. Where things on the android device were hard to read because they were too small, they are fine now, so overall less zooming and moving content around. On other Apps the difference is neglible but the apps that do support the Plus, it seems to be optimized better than most android apps that have to scale from whatever over 1080p up to 1440p.

Agree. You won't catch me dead wearing something like a pair of cargo shorts. My 5s is already pushing the limit on some pockets.

> This seems like one of those trends thats driven by the manufacturers

Yep. People don't know what they want until Steve Jobs tells them what they want. Too bad he's gone.

    >You won't catch me dead wearing something like a pair of cargo shorts....

    >People don't know what they want until Steve Jobs tells them what they want.

What if Steve had told you you want cargo shorts?

True, people didn't care about smartphones until Steve told them that they need one.

Me too, I want the phone to be as compact as possible in order to fit any of my pockets. 5S already makes the holes in my pockets in some extreme situations.

In my city I see the phablets as something really preferred by women: they don't carry their belongings in the pockets anyway, and the bigger screen means "better" Facebook.

I know tons of smart people have already thought about this, but I still wonder if it would make more sense to collect almost all of the buttons at the bottom of a phone's interface.

Maybe swiping to go back makes this point moot.

I got my first iPhone a while ago (a non-plus iPhone 6) and I've found the top widgets very inconvenient to access. Especially the top-left corner which is awkward even when using the phone with both hands. I've found myself arranging the home screen icons so that the most often used apps are on the bottom row (other than the four in the dock.)

That's the paradigm of WP7/WP8 -- and now they're changing it. Sad.

Wasn't the paradigm swiping between columns? That didn't work when there was more than a few columns.

What I had in mind was just relocating the toolbar to the bottom.

Android designers have explained that they moved away from tabs at the bottom of the screen in 4.0 because with both the navigation bar & another set of controls one of top of the other, users were just making way too many input errors. (I don't have the source handy, sorry)

My palm already hits the button in the bottom-right hand corner all the time in certain apps with tabs, like the twitter app.

I really wish they'd get rid of that bottom tab bar and shove them under a hamburger button even though that's supposedly bad.

Sorry, I've got to disagree. The 4S packed so much stuff it was very heavy. The iPhone5 was much better, but even the iPhone6 is lighter (4S/5/6:140g/112g/129g). Given the size of the 6, the weight difference is marginal.

Can't see how you go back to smaller without a very dense product - given battery.

I'm with you. I like the iPhone 5 size more than the 4s form factor, but the 6 is just too big.

My wife says that you can do everything with your thumb on an iPhone 6. You double tap the home button and that brings the screen down so you can reach everything. Will that work for you?

Well, we are talking personal preference here.

But I've been thinking of ditching Apple anyhow. So I'll be looking into decent Android phones. Or dig the old Nokia brick out of storage and go caveman.

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