

4 inches - relation
http://dcurt.is/4-inches

======
majormajor
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?

~~~
ceejayoz
Did you read the post? He says it's only "barely acceptable" at 4 inches -
hardly glowing praise, and the S3 has a 4.8 inch screen.

~~~
dpark
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).

~~~
ceejayoz
That he thinks slightly larger is potentially a good thing doesn't make it an
inconsistent belief that hugely larger is not a good thing.

~~~
dpark
It's pretty inconsistent when 4 inches is "slightly larger" for Apple but 4
inches is "hugely larger" for anyone else.

~~~
projct
Except the the difference is 0.5 inches between 4S and 5, vs 1.3" difference
between 4S and S3.

~~~
dpark
Curtis didn't say that manufacturers with 4.8+ inch screens were wrong. He
said manufacturers with 4+ inch screens were wrong. i.e. Apple today

Also the phone screen he was comparing against (S II) was only 0.8 inches
larger, at 4.3 inches.

------
gfodor
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.

~~~
zbowling
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.

~~~
kamechan
> 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.

~~~
zbowling
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.

~~~
css771
There was never any such recommendation. The back button is an essential
android feature.

------
bicknergseng
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.

~~~
saurik
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.

~~~
gms
Have you ever heard the phrase 'optimise for the common case'?

~~~
saurik
"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.

[http://www.steinbuhler.com/assets/images/HandSizeChartNewWeb...](http://www.steinbuhler.com/assets/images/HandSizeChartNewWeb.jpg)

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.

~~~
gms
A large hand can still comfortably use a small phone. A small hand cannot use
a large phone.

------
ilija139
"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.

~~~
gburt
Apple made it though, man.

------
JimmaDaRustla
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?

~~~
niggler
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 :)

------
soccerdave
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.

------
dmauro
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...](http://dmaurolizer.com/post/18478902007/ioss-major-flaw-reaching-for-
the-back-button)

~~~
majormajor
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?

------
MatthewPhillips
> 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.

------
siglesias
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.

------
cookingrobot
Does no one remember what Johnnie Cochran taught us? "If the glove does not
fit, you must acquit".

People have different sized hands - there's no such thing as a perfect sized
phone.

------
dasil003
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?

------
Lockyy
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.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
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.

------
bitcartel
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?

------
cargo8
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.

~~~
esolyt
Besides, on most apps, you change tabs by swiping left and right.

------
esolyt
"Every area of the screen is reachable, after all (unlike many Android phones
with 4-inch+ screens)"

Because 4-inch is the upper limit and Apple got it right again.

------
rayiner
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.

------
dylanrw
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.

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bryanlarsen
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...

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cheald
I do apologize for the low-content comment, but somehow, all I can think of in
reading this is this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C89uOeDL9Gw>

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parbo
The 3.7" 858x480 (240 ppi) 16:9 screen of my Motorola Defy pretty much hits
the sweet spot for me.

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antidaily
_Even so, the benefits vastly outweigh the downsides._

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jopt
502, or is that just me?

~~~
joeblau
This is usually what I check if I think a site is down --
<http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://dcurt.is/>

------
ktizo
_"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."_

4 inch telescreen bellyfeel doubleplusgood

