I long for the days of being able to reach all four corners of my phone screen with one thumb. I had an iPhone 12 mini which was a wonderful respite, but apparently us small phone fans are a small enough demographic to not warrant serving.
What's extra annoying is I never felt the need to use a case when phones were smaller, but one-handed corner reaching upsets the balance of the phone in my hand now to the point where it feels like a necessity—making the phone even bigger and bulkier.
iPhone has this accessibility feature ‘Reachability’ that can help. On the SE you double tap (but not click) the home button, I think on others you swipe up and down quickly from the bottom centre.
Reachability is useless and no substitute for a smaller screen. It just slows you down, obscures the bottom half of the screen and makes a lot of gestures impossible.
I believe that sort of feature got to Android first, and they're still there, but in reality they are no substitute for actual reach. They add cognitive and time overhead to the gesture.
> the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it.
Then they released the enormous 6.8" Zenfone 11 Ultra this March, with still no indication that there will be a smaller variant. The small Zenfone 10 might not have sold well enough to justify doing another one.
Small display sizes used to mean "cheap phone" for so long that people still won't pay more money for a smaller device.
Not for lack of trying, since both Apple and Samsung tried in 2019 with their mini iPhones and Galaxy S10e respectively which were both smaller versions of their normal phones. Neither line continues today.
Apple has some precedent with their premium iPad Mini which costs more than their normal iPad and gets irregularly updated, but it might be hard to market an "iPhone Mini SE Pro".
It's actually the opposite - big screens inevitably mean "expensive", and phones are status symbols. Unfortunately, vain people outnumber practical people by various orders of magnitude, so the market goes where the money is.
The only way to correct this trend would be to coopt an inordinate amount of celebrities, and make them advocate for smaller phones. That's the only group that vain people will blindly follow.
I suspect in practice we're stuck with big phones until the phone concept actually manages to disappear entirely (turning into wearables or lenses).
For the majority of the population, their phone is their main computing platform. It makes sense beyond "vanity" that people want the display on their main computing platform to be large.
My wife inherits my phones, and when I first switched to the iPhone "Max" size, she thought they were ridiculously, impractically large and was reluctant to switch. But after she had used it for a month or two, she couldn't go back, having that big screen is just too nice. For watching video, looking at photos, reading text, etc.
I had the opposite experience. I've been using a larger phone for the last 3 years and to be honest, I'm ready to go back. Too many times I had to look up something in a hurry, one-handed, and just couldn't. It also fell off my hands way too often, and the choice between a sturdy one (that makes it even more unmanageably big) and a flimsy one (that will only protect from light scratches) is just depressing.
Yup. I had a Pixel 4a, which is 5.8". I thought it was a great phone and still perfectly usable, but it stopped getting security updates. I'm now using a Pixel 8. It's fine, but too large and no headphone jack. I'd buy a new Pixel tomorrow if they released a smaller one.
Yes, this too! The in-screen fingerprint reader on the Pixel 8 is distinctly not as good as the dedicated one on the Pixel 4a. I'm surprised they shipped it.
> the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it
Adoration alone does not pay salaries. At the end of the day the manufacturers are businesses looking to generate as large a profit as possible (some even want to build the best tech possible while doing so), so as much as any of us may adore one feature or another, the only thing that really matters is sales volume and the resulting profits.
There's usually a #a model like that around April/May. I think they stagger the release as many(most) would probably just opt for the a model most of the time.
6.3” is still huge. 5.8” is workable. And it’s not like there’s no precedent, the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it.