So a while back the benefits didn't outweigh the "huge downside" that he found the screen size of the Galaxy SII, but now that Apple increases their screen size "the software benefits that come from that extra half an inch hugely improve the experience of using the phone."
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?
Did you? He also said "the software benefits that come from that extra half an inch hugely improve the experience of using the phone." That's certainly praise, possibly even glowing.
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).
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.
The problem people had with the original article was the smugness with which he made the argument. Here's the worst part (from the 3.5 article):
> 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 other oft-overlooked part of this discussion is te frequency of one-handed use.
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?
The elephant in the room is that unlike on android phones, there is no hardware 'back' button on iPhone. Where is it instead (by convention)? The top left corner of the screen, ie, the most unreachable place on the new iPhone. I'm still amazed this thing was produced by Apple given that oversight.
There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either and every time you rotate the screen it's in a different locations (and a different location if it's on landscape vs portrait on tablets vs phones.) It's widely inconstant on Android too. And what happens when you press also is not very consistant when what you are working isn't inherently stack based.
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.
> There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either...
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.
You can still support it sure, but the recommendation from google is to move away from them on phones. IIRC (don't quote me) on tablets, it's a requirement.
It might not be hardware anymore, but there is still a ubiquitous back button. And depending on how you look at it, the rotation change could be a good thing - the intention is to keep the ubiquitous button set closest to where your hands will be resting.
It's not though. The back button on phones stays on the top or bottom edge (the icons just rotate to face you). Which side it will be on is wild guess though depending on the phone and OEM.
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.
On my Galaxy Nexus the back button is always in the exact same physical position, which is nice because you can reflexively hit it like a hard button and you won't get caught out in cases where it's transitioning from portrait to landscape or vice versa.
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.
My post had nothing to do with Android. I personally like iOS and am sad that I won't be buying iPhone 5. My point was just that iOS's back button convention is completely at odds with the new screen size.
Not every app needs a back button, though. It's really that simple. That and the behavior is unpredictable because the button can't be labeled, being hardware. If a modal dialog pops up, say in a game, it will be a gamble whether the back button dismisses the dialog or shoots me back to the task I was doing prior to firing up the game. It's not that well thought out an idea.
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.
By default in Android, back key pressed when dialogs are showing simply dismiss those dialogs. There are app authors who override back button behavior (wrongly) and break this paradigm. The persistent availability of the back button is great, for the most part, as I know I should be able to get back to where I was in most scenarios.
My post was entirely about placement and now the new iPhone's screen size goes against the convention of top left for back button on iOS. The fact that so many people are reading deeply into my mention of Android and jumping in to talk about hardware back buttons and/or defend Android is bizarre to me.
You can swipe right to get back in Music app and a few more apps. Apple also considered the use of the "Home" button for some "back" actions — back to home screen, back to a recent opened app.
People are reading way too into my mention of Android's hardware button here. My point is that before iPhone 5, iOS had a sane convention of back buttons being at the top left corner of the screen. (And Android had a relatively sane one in the form of a hardware button, for comparison.) Now, with the bigger screen, this sane convention has instantly turned into a regular pain point. It would be much better now, for example, if navigation in an app were exclusively in the bottom bar so it could be reached easily by the user, and the top bar is a "read-only" information bar with perhaps buttons for destructive or rarely-needed actions.
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.
I have long cited this one difference (the ubiquitous back button) as the tipping point that makes me consider Android feel more usable, on average, than iOS. I never considered that one reason I feel that way is because of the placement and reachability, but it makes sense. That's not the only reason, though; having "Back" handled by the OS allows a "back stack" and more seamless multitasking.
I think it's pretty clear that the iPhone screen was increased in size to help them compete against Android for "feature shoppers" (people who just look at numerical stats of phones, rather than try them and judge which they like better). This is probably the majority of smartphone shoppers, although Apple has traditionally primarily targeted the "experience shoppers" (people who actually know that they prefer Apple products rather than just chasing the newest/lightest/fastest/thinnest phone).
I don't personally think the top-left is hard to hit, but all apps I've seen that have a "back" button there (including third-party apps) also let you swipe right-to-left across the top bar to perform this action.
I would just like to point out that this is a highly subjective argument. The iPhone 5 might be too large for Dustin's hand, but I'm quite comfortable using a 4.3 or even 4.5 inch phone. I naturally hold phones with the bottom right corner in pushing the bottom of my hand like the second image on the page, and my hand quite naturally wraps a phone up to ~4.5". For me, emphasis me, any phone over 4.5 becomes a problem because my index finger will have a hard time hitting a power switch on the top right of the phone, but overall I'm able to reach any point of the screen with my thumb and small muscle movements in my hand. But again, this is all subjective to the size of my hand.
Exactly: an iPhone 4 is to my girlfriend's hand nearly exactly as a Galaxy Note is to mine. The idea that people make these reachability arguments as if hand size is universal down to silly half-inch increments is downright insane.
"Have you ever heard of 'variance'?" The "common case" makes sense when you are dealing with a discrete variable that has a mode (a single highly common value): it does not make as much sense for a continuous one like hand span.
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.
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.
"Even so, the benefits vastly outweigh the downsides." I found this a bit hypocritical. Why wasn't this the case for the Android phones in his "3.5 Inches" blog post? And as gfodor noted, this can only be worse for the iPhone, considering the location of the back button.
Is it me, or are people just dancing to Apple's fiddle? I've seen this same type of post several times, but it doesn't apply to me...or most people I know most likely.
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?
One-handed use is important for circumstances where you are carrying a bag with the other hand (like when you have to deal with luggage at the airport).
After seeing some of my friends struggle with the 5, I'm not going to upgrade (my 4S works just fine :)
I had surgery on my right wrist a number of years ago and I still don't have great flexibility in it. About 3 days after getting the iPhone 5 I started getting some pain in my wrist and was actually able to equate it to the odd reach down by my thumb to hit the home button. After being conscious of this, I started holding the phone a bit lower in my hand and the pain went away within a day and I haven't had it come back. It's definitely a little more difficult to reach spots on the phone, but I'm still torn on it cause I do like the bigger screen. I actually wish there was a button on the side of the phone that I could use as an alternate home button.
I don't think he would be so quick to say it's worth the extra screen space if he weren't left-handed. Reaching the back button with only your right hand, even on the 3.5" screen is difficult. After switching to an iPhone 4s earlier this year I found that to be the major failing of the device:
http://dmaurolizer.com/post/18478902007/ioss-major-flaw-reac...
Huh, that's interesting, I'm right handed and generally hold my phone in my left hand, so that my more dextrous hand is free to either touch the screen or do other things (like open doors).
I wonder what's more common: holding the phone in your off hand or your dominant hand?
> iOS’s tab bars are anchored to the bottom of the screen, where your thumb more naturally rests, so it remains easy to change app sections (contrast this with Android’s tab bars, which are usually located at the top of the screen, and sometimes out of reach).
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.
Point of correction, Dustin. Navigation Bars are top anchored in iOS. You might be thinking Tab Bars. As such, Tab Bars are being replaced increasingly with Dive Bars, the ones that live under the app, a la Facebook and Path. This makes the reaching problem worse because the common elements are in the top left. I suspect that we might see swipe-based gestures increasingly handle back button behavior and maybe a bottom oriented "under-menu" for placing compose and add elements.
Edit: Appears to have been corrected, but point still stands.
I greatly respect Dustin Curtis as a designer but the precision with which he treats this subject is entirely derived from the flawed assumption that the perfect phone size can be narrowed down to half-inch increments.
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've never really had an issue with any sort of ability to reach all of the screen on my galaxy nexus, which he seems to imply I should have horrible problems with. I think this is down to the way I actually use both my hands for almost all tasks. Holding it in my left hand and operating the screen with my right.
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.
Of course this is all anecdotal, but I recently switched from T-Mobile to VZ; and I went "down" from my 4.65" SGN to a 4.3" Razr M. I wouldn't say the extra size of the SGN gave me "horrible problems", but the size aggravated me enough to where I was willing to give up the extra DPI to have a smaller phone again. Likewise, I always found the 3.5" iPhones too cramped to use comfortably. Screens are not one-size-fits-all.
The notion that Apple or anybody else can design the perfect sized screen based upon holding the phone in one hand and thumb reach is silly, because in this scenario many apps are rendered useless without multi-touch!
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?
Also want to point out that Android typically focuses most of the content towards the bottom of the screen (e.g. most people put icons on the bottom half of their home screen on Android, vs. iPhones that default to Top-Left). Dustin talks about how iPhones have their tab bars at the bottom vs. Android at the top, making the tabs easier to reach, but really the bigger problem is what he points out that ALL of the iPhones real action buttons are at the top, and out of reach.
My wife is miffed about the iPhone 5's larger screen, because the 3.5" screen model was at the edge of what was comfortable for her to deal with one-handed.
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.
Dustin neglects in either post to mention what size his hands are. Subjectively some people will like the new size for this reason, and as he points out others will not. I personally like the format but I have abnormally large hands (I can palm a basketball). His thoughts on hand placement are spot on though.
Take at look at the last picture in the post, where the base of the iPhone is cupped in the hand and the thumb is using the keyboard. From that picture it really appears to me that Apple would have been better off making the iPhone wider rather than taller...
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed."
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?