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MiddleEndianyesterday at 10:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

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)


Replies

dwedgetoday at 7:54 AM

I can't find it now but I'm sure I saw some people cutting samsungs in half to get something similar. The only one I could find was this: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/A_Modified_zFlip...

MiddleEndianyesterday at 10:37 PM

On the topic of the thread, I am left-handed. When I tried to resize the keyboard while it was closed, it constantly glitched out. Could not figure out what was going on until I rotated it 180° and tried it with my right hand. Resizing worked perfectly lol. Something about coordinates I imagine. I hear left-handed phone users used to have their horizontal photos come out upside down until someone figured it out.

On the other hand, I'm also a Dvorak user, and the Dvorak layout in SwiftKey has the delete key on the left, which is super convenient. Shown here: https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg