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recursiveyesterday at 8:46 PM6 repliesview on HN

I'm a man with typically sized hands. I can barely do anything one-handed on a phone. Phones are so big they basically require two-handed operation for me. Like you, I typically hold it in my left hand, so I can use my right hand to tap stuff.


Replies

robin_realayesterday at 9:04 PM

There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis, and I plan to keep it going until Apple caves and makes a sensibly sized phone again.

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MiddleEndianyesterday at 10:34 PM

I agree that phones are too big. I refuse to switch to two-handed phone use. I used the Palm Phone PVG 100 with a 3.3" screen as long as I could, but software got too slow and battery-hungry, and my now-wife was annoyed when my phone would die halfway through our text based conversations lol. Used a chunky 3.5"er (Soyes S10Max) for awhile but it died after a year.

Now I use the Motorola Razr 2025. 90% of the time I just keep it closed. The outer screen is 3.6" and a square, but the screen doesn't extend all the way out if you keep the hinge on the side. It's kinda heavy at 6.6oz (compared to the Palm Phone's 2.2oz), but with a ring, it's super easy to use one-handed. And it has battery life and compute power to handle today's unnecessarily compute-heavy apps. You can also split apps in half when it's open so you can just use them on the bottom half of the phone.

Pictures:

https://www.middleendian.com/phone.jpg

https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

Main disadvantage is that when it's closed, you only have a "selfie" camera as the back camera is facing you and the front camera is inside. So it's hard to quickly take pictures of things I see outside (usually funny birds). Other annoyance is that if you open the phone, use it, and then close it, the outer keyboard resets to the default keyboard and you need to "change the keyboard layout" to get it to use your preferred keyboard (Microsoft Swiftkey in my case)

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nomelyesterday at 11:48 PM

If you have an iPhone, enabling reachability is very nice [1].

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...

IncreasePostsyesterday at 10:45 PM

I have a regular pixel 10, and I can palm a basketball. But I can't use this phone one handed.

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ThrowawayTestryesterday at 8:58 PM

Get a ring for the back of your phone. Makes one handed use much easier.

madaxe_againyesterday at 8:54 PM

I’m a guy who’ll leave his laptop on the floor and will bend double from a chair to use it, on the floor, because I have forgotten I can pick it up. I am ergonomically insensitive.

Anyway, I use my phone in my left hand, my right hand, or both, pretty much equally.