Phones need to go back to being half their size
I use one handed mode on my phone all the time because the damn thing is so fucking big. I can't even reach the toolbar with my baby hands. I had no choice but to buy this one cause it was the only one with decent battery in my price range. If I didn't have a purse it'd be impossible to carry it's like a brick in my pocket. It strains my wrist a little from it's sheer weight. Wtf is going on
I just miss having a physical keyboard on my phone. Not like a blackberry, more like this phone I had with a slideout keyboard like 14 years ago. That shit was so dope, dude. It had arrow keys and a big round enter button, it was easy to play ROMs with.
But no everything has to be a fucking touch screen now. Even the fucking bedside lamp I have uses touch buttons instead of actual buttons, which only work half the time you press them and are super easy to hit accidentally.
I tried replacing my phone with gpd ultra portable notebooks but it just doesn't work. I have one of the most recent phones with a sliding keyboard (that wasn't vaporware) and they're basically useless today since I can't get service with it.
Yeah it sucks. Once in a while I do a search to see if anyone is making a functional phone with a slideout keyboard and it's always some upcoming phone that's ridiculously expensive and has a sketchy vibe.
I just want to feel the buttons, man...
I agree. Make them half as big this year, half as big the next year, then again half as big the year after that ans at some point we'll finally be rid of them
The phone will disappear when the tortoise crosses the finish line
Microphones cross the blood brain barrier
IQ curve meme
Phone bad - actually phone is a value free medium and could be used for good if not for capitalism - phone bad
phones need to be modular and open again, like computers used to be.
that way we have more choice on how we use it, and how much money we spend on it.
https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks
Never forget what google took from us
it was silly that you could just pull it apart by hand, but a concept like this with a screw on cover or something would be rad.
in a fairer society we could probably form a consortium and standardize a modular phone just like the nerds did back then with pcs. it has almost all of the advantages.
At least half of raspberry pi projects would be more easily accomplished by one of the phones kicking around in your junk drawer. If the bootloaders and hardware were fully open, making a linux distro run on them would be trivial. This would save thousands of phones from the landfill by repurposeing them as alarm clocks, thermostats, webcams, smarthome ___, and so on. They even come with a built in touchscreen and battery, which ras-pis don't!
The only cost to the company is open sourcing some software and internal documentation at end of life. My fingers are crossed the EU might do this but I doubt they will.
imagine what we could do with more open hardware.
Phones need to stop being 20:9 and 22:9.
The "size" is measured by the diagonal, and the width stays the same while the height gets longer, because increasing the height does more for the diagonal than increasing the width does. The keyboard hasn't gotten any bigger; in fact it feels smaller.
You need to choke up on the phone and stretch just to open the toolbar (with the size of my hands, if I have to do it, everyone has to do it). Holding the phone, it always wobbles because it's not balanced in your hand, the center of mass is past your fingers. You even need to glance up and down to look at the whole thing. At a certain point the folding phones in folded mode will be the only thing that feels reasonable and proportional to use.
But hey, "everything is scrolling now". Everyone buys the long phones, so naturally that must be what the market wants. I guess you can consume more scrolling content and spend more of your time swiping just to feel like you're moving towards what you want. Oh and everything is video now. It's just the new codexes that we need to accommodate. Ultrawide. If it's not optimized for ultrawide it's not modern. That's why we make sure there are unused black bars on the side of each and every video because the phone is so long. Bezels. We've got to make the bezels finer.
16:9 devices were the peak. Every year we stray further from God's light (the golden ratio).
I fucking hate long phones so much. They suck for video, they suck for reading (especially comics/manga), they suck for ergonomics. The only thing they're good for is doomscrolling and being able to watch an entire 9:16 video while seeing the next one peeking at you underneath it.
It's infuriating as most womens clothes don't come with good pockets and all the accesories you can wear as carry space has to get bigger and bigger due to the phone taking so much space. My current phone has been dying on me for months and I have a (bigger) replacement ready to go, but I am postponing using it as much as I can as the size annoys me so much. I like to hike and go for walks and I hate carrying a bigger bag of some kind to have the phone on me along with a water bottle. When they were smaller, it used to fit in my tiny belt bag with a water bottle and keys. The new ones don't.
The huge phone also legitimately restricts range of motion if it is in a pant pocket. You can't squat or do anything with it there. Or it just falls out.
Still remember the early days of mobile phones where it getting smaller was the signifier of a better product. It's annoying it went completely the other way with smartphones.
Even at the beginning of smartphones some brands continued producing smaller models. I had the HTC wildfire, it was great
Conspiracy by big pant, big phone, and big bag for people to have to buy a handbag to hold their tablet sized phones because their pant pockets are too small and their phones are the length of their femur.
belt holster that phone then you don't even need a bag
And be one of the phone on belt type of guys? No.
I don't ever wear belts, belts are rarely involved in womens clothing, not to mention in exercise wear. I do have a belt bag (fanny bag) like I said, but I wear it over the shoulder and it is still too small for the newer phones.
My wife has been hanging on for dear life to her first gen iPhone SE, because it's the only damn phone that will usually fit in the pockets on women's jeans.
the iphone 13 mini has the same size and was life saving when my SE died
I wish even 6" was an option, these days 6.3" is considered small. I would've pogged up for the Zenfone 10 if the software support wasn't so decroded
decroded
Vote For Pedro
I was turned awya from the zenfone 10 after Asus backed out on their promise to expose the bootloader. So I've just been using my zenfone 9 and will until I can't anymore
The Moto G, first generation, was the ideal sized phone, and I will not be taking any questions.
Yeah but the hardware was trash. The mic and audio processor made voices sound like a robot. And its processor was too slow to keep up with the bloatware that came preinstalled.
Not a question.
God the number of phones I have thrown in the trash is sad. What a waste.
the bloatware that came preinstalled.
Iirc it came with pure stock android. If yours had bloatware I'm guessing you got one on contract and the carrier added it. Yeah the hardware wasnt amazing but it was cheap and got the job done which couldnt be said of many other phones at the time.
By the time I got one, they were several years old, so I expected slow. It was fine after debloating, but obviously people can't be expected to do that. Agree on the sound, also the camera was Not Great, even for the time.
How about: we need a selection of phone sizes?
I've got a relatively small phone, and small hands, but really my biggest complaint is how much vertical space my phone takes up in my pocket, and that if I put something hard in the same pocket as my phone, the screen is now in jeopardy. I've been watching some of the folding phones that are coming out in anticipation that this maybe solves those issues, but we'll see.
I have yaoi hands and love my gargantuan pixel 8 pro
Well, good news for you! They now fold in half.
I have big hands and a pixel 4 and it fucking sucks. I should probably switch to single hand mode. It will probably be better for me in the long run.
i had to get a new phone recently (old one died, rip prince of 5+ years), and I got one that was a couple years old partially because they got bigger with each release (and partially bc it was cheaper). like, how r they gonna continue the trend of increasing the size with each phone... just buy a tablet if you want a huge screen....
Since phones are used more and more for streaming video content, we're never going back to small screens because they believe everyone wants a miniature movie theater screen in their pocket
We now view our media on a 4" by 2" screen and we like it.
They have played us for absolute fools
unihertz jelly star
It’s kind of a shitty phone but it’s tiny. From a review:
“Some web pages just don't work due to the small screen size - if there's a top and a bottom banner (shopping cart etc.) there's no room left for the actual content”
It’s that tiny. 3” screen, about the size of a credit card, and it has a transparent plastic back which I think is pretty neat
Is it shitty for the reasons you’ve outlined, or something else?
I have one and it's great, zero complaints. The OS runs great, battery life is excellent and I quickly got used to using websites and apps on a small screen. Only downside is no OS updates, but I just put LineageOS on mine.
I had one and I hated it. Build quality was poor and the screen cracked after I dropped it one foot Also the screen was abnormally blue - a k own issue with Unihertz phones, and the screen was indeed to small.
Cute as all hell though
Samsung Galaxy S4 was the perfect phone size. Just make it a little bit thicker for a bigger battery/camera and put a modern chip in it and it's perfect.
You don't even need to make it that much thicker. Here's a side-by-side of a Galaxy S4 and a Pixel 9:
I have a galaxy a50 from 2019 and it's still an ok size. It's funny that these days people envy me for it, because it's still a bit smaller. A shame that it's now literally coming apart at the seams.
In my mind the galaxy 2 I had was already plenty big. It was still a phone you could put in a pocket. Then I had the S5 neo and that wasn't too bad yet either.
That's why I'm holding onto my 2020 Samsung s10 for dear life. And when it inevitably passes to a better life, I'll just get a refurbished one for a 10th the price of a new phone.
Perfect size to hold with one hand and fit in most pockets, with good enough guts (it was a flagship when it came out) to run most current apps without issues.
I loved my old moto but the fuckers phased out 3g and now I'm stuck in phablet hell if I want a decent battery
I also find 6.1" to be ideal and anything larger to be cumbersome. Dad got me a Galaxy S24 last Christmas, which is the same size as an S10 and the same size as the Huawei P8 I have fond memories of.
Note: I actually wanted a Xiaomi 13, but dad buys everyone Samsungs and found that "too Chinese", his words which he couldn't elaborate on.
As someone with abnormally large hands i like them being bigger but ya i can see how it would be an issue for normal sized people.
The phone I had before my first smartphone, a Motorola Razr V3, was 2.1 × 3.9 × 0.54 inches
I remember thinking that my first smartphone, the iPhone 4s, was enormous at 4.54 × 2.31 × 0.37 inches.
The current iPhone is 5.81 × 2.82 × 0.31 inches.
But at least the least important dimension keeps getting fractionally smaller I guess?
You can't have bigger battery life but a smaller phone. That's the whole reason they're bigger!
You can make them thicker. Also, a smaller screen uses less power, especially if it's also lower resolution.
sorry I need a large, very high resolution, high refresh rate screen for all the tik toks, reels, and shorts.
Some phones*
I need my XL models.
-Sincerely, someone with large hands.
No, it will be the size of your fingernails fuck you
I vacillate between "This is just sexism at work making phones for men's hands" and "This is just capitalism at work, making phones so large they're easily dropped and broken, necessitating new purchases."
Probably both
Also bring back mandatory 3.5mm headphone jacks.