Sorry but I disagree. I'm not sure how he holds his iPhone but I cradle it with my 4 fingers with my pinky supporting it from the bottom. This allows my thumb to extend well past the edge of the iPhone.
I think he's reading too much into the design. Larger isn't necessarily better. The iPhone 4's screen is good enough for me, I've never had any issues except for trying to read pdfs, which is one reason why I keep considering getting an iPad. But for everything else, I find the screen more than good enough and it's still small enough to fit in my pocket.
No, I'm saying that his argument is nonsensical. I can go well past the edges of the iPhone with my thumb, probably by another 33%. I'm sure most people can, my fingers are quite average length (much to the disappointment of my wife).
I could probably extend well past the edges of the Android phone, as well. So I don't think that "average thumb length" had anything to do with the size of the iPhone screen.
That's a fair observation, but you must admit it takes more effort to tap with a thumb fully extended like that. Especially taking precision into account, since you end up tapping with the flat part.
I've got pretty average-sized hands and finger reach (which I know from piano lessons). With an iPhone 4 firmly gripped in what I consider a natural way, my thumb can reach comfortably to the top-right corner of the iPhone display and very little further.
So, while I think the diagram is exaggerated, the writer does have a point. My guess is that the 3.5" screen works very well a very large percentage of adult hands (say 75%) and acceptably for, say, 95%. I think a 4" display would probably pull things out of the bell curve. I suspect given that Apple probably made a LOT of prototypes that the iPhone's screen size was determined empirically.
To me, the iPhone4 feels almost exactly right in terms of width (I think it could be up to half as thick without feeling flimsy).
I own both an iPhone and an iPad and a Kindle. I'd tell you: for reading stuff, nothing beats the Kindle. PDFs though, not so much. You just can't comfortably put a letter page on a 7 inch screen.
That said, I would not buy an iPad again. I would by a Kindle instead. Just some food for thought regarding your PDF reading needs.
Different strokes for different folks. Ive had an iPhone 4 and I have Galaxy S2 with 4.5 screen now. Both are manageable.
The one thing that android is missing out of course is the Appstore eco system, it has a long way to go to match software availability/quality of Apple appstore apps.
Camera in Samsung GS2 is probably best among android phones, but i dont think its a match for iPhone 4 and definitely not a match for iPhone 4S.
The diagrams drawn are highly misleading - my thumb goes well over the edge of a 3.7" device, and afaik I have pretty normal sized thumbs. The diagram there shows the thumb ending on a 3.5" device.
I may even buy the 4.2" is too large argument since devices do get a bit unwieldy, but why not anything between 3.5" & 4"? I own a Nexus One (3.7") and I think its a perfect size - I can usually reach my thumb across with minimal effort on a 4" screen as well.
tl:dr; Claims about perfect size of phone, without any data, except images of phones superimposed with one random sample of thumb size.
There is no perfect size any more than there is a perfect sized glove, shirt, chair, etc. We programmers have gotten away with ignoring anthropometric variation till now.
Agreed, I have large hands I typically wear xl gloves, and I wish the iphone was larger. Some people may not have large hands but long fingers, there are many variations.
Here is some data to help someone answer such questions: http://dined.io.tudelft.nl/en,dined2003,102. It shows that, for Dutchmen, the difference in _average_ hand length between males and females is about 2cm. Looking at the standard deviation and across ages, one gets (at one sd) a variation between long male and short female hands of (I guesstimate) about 5cm. Thumb reach distance will be, say, about half that. I would guess elderly users not only have shorter hands, but also have less dexterity, and of course there are plenty of people outside of the +/- one stadard deviation range (37%, IIRC), so it would not surprise me at all to see difference in 'reach' of over an inch, even in small grouos of users.
And to add to this: it may be acceptable for Apple that 10% of people can't use the device optimally, but it certainly won't be acceptable if 50% of people can't use the device optimally. So you have to err on the smaller side of caution.
I was refuting his anecdotal claim with mine - I meant this to illustrate the futility of using anecdotal evidence, but the words didn't convey the sentiment as well as I intended.
I fully understand there is most likely some of normal distribution of sizes, but that's a fact that the author seems to have largely ignored as well.
I drew the diagrams from my perspective, holding the phone in my palm, and extending my thumb over the screen. I don't think I have particularly large or small hands. If you hold the phone further out in your fingers, you can extend your thumb farther, but the phone is less stable in your hand. The instability is where the "annoyance" comes from, when I'm using the Galaxy S II.
Do you have elf hands? I've got pretty small hands (I wear a small or medium in men's gloves depending on the brand), and with the iPhone tucked into my thumb as close as reasonably possible, I can reach every pixel on the screen, and I can reach past in spots. If I hold the phone so that it's most comfortable (and most secure feeling), I can reach way past the edge and slightly past the far corners.
Possibly more interesting is where you've put the centre of the arc, half way up the left hand side. As I hold mine, the centre would be over the bottom right corner of the screen, and at "maximum extension" my thumb is just over the top left corner. (I've got "Nash equilibrium" in the back of my head writing this... if I couldn't reach the whole screen, I'd probably change the way I hold my phone.)
They aren't accurate, either; the SGS is shown as relatively larger than it actually is (not much, but when making comparisons like this, percentage points matter), and the SGS's "thumb circle" is smaller!
I guess the moral of the story is that if you have 2-inch range of motion with your thumb, you shouldn't get anything larger than an iPhone and probably can't draw consistent diagrams.
If you say his diagrams are 'highly misleading', then you should also realize that your counterclaim is equally 'highly misleading' and that it doesn't actually add anything to our understanding of the situation.
He does not claim 'this size was chosen because my thumb is this large'. The blog post suggests: this size is chosen so the device can be used optimally by most of the population and he demonstrates the argument with his own thumb, without claiming it is therefore true.
Now you may very well be unconvinced by the argument and point out that you wonder whether there is any data available to test the suggestion and that it may be coincidental otherwise. However, that does not warrant the statement 'the diagrams are highly misleading'. It warrants 'the diagram may be misleading'.
I would like it very much if HN commenters would appreciate such subtleties and argue "I'm not sure you're right, because ...", instead of "You're wrong, because ...". His argument makes perfect sense and deserves to be recognized as such.
I think his diagrams are misleading because, as far as I can make out, they are based on a particularly small hand size (perhaps a 9 year old child?). By rotating my thumb, and adjusting the angle I hold the device with my fingers, I reckon I can cope with approximately a 6" diagonal screen, and I don't have big hands. For example, I wear small-size male motorcycle gloves, and most of them are still slightly too long in the finger and glove; my girlfriend wears small size female gloves, and they are only slightly too snug for me. On the basis that glove manufacturers have an economic incentive to know the size distribution of their customers' hands, I think it's implausible to say that anything bigger than 3.5" is too big.
and adjusting the angle I hold the device with my fingers
If you're going to do that, all is lost. One: having to move the entire device in your hand takes a lot of time. This is about fast access to every part of the screen. Two: chances of dropping the device increase very much. The question is: can you reach all parts of the screen with your thumb when you hold the device as you normally do. I most certainly can't.
I think a lot of folks here are not actually considering how they hold their devices and can easily operate them. I have found over and over again that I can't reach the upper corner of the other side and have been annoyed I had to shift the device around in my hand to reach it (for instance while eating an apple with the other hand). I've dropped it once that way. I'm not small, I'm not clumsy. I don't have arthritis or any lack of agility in my hand. Of course I can reach the whole screen with my thumb, if I change the way I hold the device. The point is that you don't want that. The article makes perfect sense to me and completely stacks up with my experience of using my iPhone.
I can reach all the way around the far edge of the device, holding it as I normally do. Perhaps what you are missing is the way I hold my device.
I hold my device resting on my fingers, not gripped in my hand. The first knuckle joint (i.e. the one closest to the fingernail) of my index and pinky fingers are aligned with the center line of the back of the device; the device is balanced on top of my fingers. This gives me the biggest range of movement over the surface of the device, and more importantly gives me better fine control over what my thumb hits - not only is thumb movement a factor, but fine finger movement as well. Adjusting the angle of holding the phone doesn't mean "shifting the device around in my hand" - it merely means changing the angle of my fingers.
I think a bigger factor in how the iPhone is better designed than most other phones is how touchscreen sensitivity drops off around the edges (if this behaviour is indeed deliberate). Before I moved to Android, I used to hold my device gripped between my fingertips and the center of my palm, but I found this didn't work as well with the Nexus One, because the sensitive edge of the touchscreen meant that the little fold of skin from my palm was creating phantom touches on the screen edge. So I stopped gripping my devices; I now hold them all resting on my fingers when I'm using the touchscreen.
And then he says that the one he prefers is the one objectively correct way, which is silly. Personally, I find the minor inconvenience on the rare occasions I have to hit a corner of the 4" Nexus S one-handed is far outweighed by the increased reading comfort of the larger screen.
Post facto? You reeeeally believe Apple hadn't build tons of prototypes in various sizes PRE FACTO (sic), and made extensive research in what is more comfortable for the largest majority of people?
I was looking at notebooks and thinking I want a big screen but with the keyboard in the center. I want my hands write in front of me, but I don't want to look to one side. I 'know' apple do it that way. Then I found an HP that was almost like that but the F was more left than the J was right, which are the home keys, so I thought still no good. Then I looked at the Apple and it was the same the F was more left that J was right. So I decided it must be right to do that, because Apple know best.
Yes, it's a "No True Scotsman variation" that takes into account the fact that a particular company gives TONS of attention to detail, builds lots of internal prototypes, and values usability and good industrial design ("how it works") greatly.
The fact that you don't know if something specific happened does not mean that you cannot reason about the high possibility of it happening given the historical information you have available.
Given what we know about Apple, Ives et al, what exactly do you believe of the two:
1) Apple picked the dimensions at random or without thought
2) Apple studied to find the best compromise for the device's dimensions
Stating that this "seems like something Apple would consider" is a far cry from what this blog post does: take one data point's worth of design value from an existing design for one user, extrapolate that to be one of the lead drivers of said design for all users.
I'm all for giving Apple's designs as much credit as possible, but it's still a far cry from even that to "wow this thing about the design I just noticed that works for me must have been something they considered for the populace at large."
The author made a very astute point that I haven't seen mentioned online before (but one that immediately occurred to me when I heard people bitching about Apple not going to 4+ inch screens). His single data point illustrates a general problem: one handed operation for people with a wide-range of hand sizes.
Remember, Apple sells one basic body shape to its entire market. No single Android phone sells anything comparable to as many units as the iPhone. The body shape has to be usable for 95% of Apple's potential market, which includes everything from teenage girls to grown men. Apple undoubtedly thought about exactly the problem the author raised.
Sadly, I've got below average sized hands. I can't even reach all the way across my Palm Pre. Even holding a iphone is just a touch uncomfortable. One of the things that's kept me off the device. You can't please everyone.
Most of the arguments here are that "well my thumbs can reach far past the iPhone screen".
That's not what he's arguing. I can reach the pedals of my car with the seat all the way back, too, but I'll probably plow into someone as a result.
He's arguing that it's not comfortable to do so, and I agree. Stretching my thumb across the iPhone screen (top-left / top right) is as close to uncomfortable as I'd like to be. When my thumb is over there, the phone arches forward because of the position of my index finger, almost moving the phone out of my hand. Any larger of a screen and it'll go flying.
Whether or not Apple decided on the original screen size because of this, it was a good decision to not increase the size of the screen with the 4S.
To add to this point, it's not comfortable for the majority of users. If you look at a normal distribution of users, they want to cover some sort of number and I'd wager that this screen size is hitting that number.
EDIT: Spelling. I don't know why I mentioned "normal" either.Apple simply wants to cover a majority of users.
Because Apple generally tries to create products that appeal to a large percentage of the population, not "blind faith". It's an observation based on common sense.
I disagree, and I'm presenting as much evidence for it as you are (i.e. none). In which conference was Apple's finding published? Where can I download a PDF of the paper?
This is the only response to the article that gets it. When I read the article, I immediately picked up my iPod touch and put my thumb into the top-right corner as far as I could stretch it while remaining comfortable. It rests right on the corner, covering it nearly perfectly.
I can keep stretching it to the point where the last joint in my thumb meets the edge, but it feels terrible to do so.
I'm sure this wasn't the only factor that went into the decision for the screen size, but I have to think it was an inflexible maximum boundary for it.
One thing I don't see pointed out much is how the iPhone is just about as wide as iPods with a docking connector (dating back to 2003 with the 3rd gen.)
Specifically, the original iPhone was 1.1 mm narrower than iPods, and iPhone 4 is 3.2 mm narrower.
I definitely think the iPhone is the size that it is because the iPod was also around the same size. It's entirely possible they were both part of an overarching plan in the transition from "Apple computer" to Apple, the shiny thingy consumer company. Some considerations for the form factor would have been similar for both - eg, able to be manipulated with one hand, fits in the pocket, consistency and compatibility with third-party ecosystem.
3.5" I consider too small. Even for my little 12 year old sister I plan on buying a 3.7" Motorola Defy+ soon. I wouldn't get anything less than 4" for myself, and my next device is probably going to be a 4.3" one unless the Nexus Prime is just too awesome to pass up.
Rumor is that the Prime will have a 4.65 inch screen. Why stop there? The Galaxy Note is 5.3 inches.
Android handsets are becoming ridiculous. We spent all this time trying to make things small, but in an effort to differentiate themselves, manufacturers started making things huge again.
Most of the high end phones would not even fit comfortably in my jeans pockets.
There's definitively a large market segment for whom the iPhone form factor is too small. Myself included - it was one of the big things that stopped me from getting one; I just can't type on the thing at a reasonable speed.
My HTC Desire HD is more than small enough to fit in my pocket, and rests comfortably in my hand, and I love having a decent sized display and I can actually type on it at a tolerable speed. I could easily handle a device a bit bigger than that with one hand, I might just get one because it reduces the number of situations where the screen is "too small" for it to be nice to use.
The iPhone 4S has a 3.5 diagonal screen, but a 5.1 inch diagonal frame.
Most Android phones are increasing the screen size while decreasing the bezel, but only the increased screen size gets quoted. The next generation using Ice-Cream Sandwich, such as the Prime you mention, can replace the capacitive keys at the bottom with on-screen buttons, just like Honeycomb tablets. The screen size alone doesn't tell you everything about the device size.
This site shows a comparison (note you can click in the top right corner to resize the pictures to actual size)
I'd handled the HTC Desire HD a fair bit (someone at work has one). The opposite end of increasing as a square is that small increases are bigger than they sound. It's a lot of phone there.
I am sure a lot of people are fine with it.
If they could make everything edge to edge, I'l be right there with with.
At least with Firefox you can drag the images and get a trasparent onion-skin image to move around and compare any edges you want. It's still not much bigger.
Different strokes for different folks. I would like a bigger screen and I don't wear jeans. If you don't want a big screen, there will be plenty of Android phones with smaller screens.
That's one big advantage Android has over the iphone. Android can cater to different segments while the iphone is one-size-fits-all (literally and figuratively).
I have a defy. It has some poor points (though it is a cheaper smartphone anyway), but what sold me on it was that the screen size was 'big enough' while the form factor barely bigger than the screen. Easy to pocket, light, and tough.
Compare to the iphone 4, which while being a nicer phone, has huge great lumps off the top and bottom of the screen - which means less pocketability / ease of management - not to mention that most iPhone 4s are even larger (and less attractive) due to the plastic bumper.
The form factor is what sold me on the defy over the first-class range of android phones, despite it being a bit underpowered and having one or two other issues, some of which were due to Motorola bloatware that went away when CM7 went on.
I find that in portable devices, getting the right size for you is a much underrated question when people look to buy tech.
I'm getting a defy+ for exactly that reason (that and the fact that it might actually not break on me). I've got several friends with with Galaxy S phones and I simply find them to damn big. Uncomfortable to hold when making calls and uncomfortable to shove into my front jeans pocket. While I'm obviously not begrudging people the right to buy huge phones, I just hope someone will stay off that bandwagon and keep making reasonable sized phones. If I need a big screen I've got my 7" tablet.
Ironically, this is something that is really bad about the iPad, while 7 inch Android tablets are much better. I recently wrote something about this, should you care: http://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/1111
Oh the other hand. I can touch type at a pretty good clip on the iPad keyboard in landscape mode something I've never been able to do on a netbook or a 7" tablet.
For what it is worth, iOS 5 helps with thumb typing on the iPad.
My Sensation has a 4.3" screen and I have no issues navigating it. I had a Nexus One prior to that, and its 3.7" screen likewise felt fine.
I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone's original screen size was dictated more by battery concerns than the average mobile thumb length of tea drinkers in the midwest or whatever crazy metric people want to use. Bigger screens use exponentially more energy. Once that size was decided, Apple's basically stuck with it, since iPhone apps use absolute layouts and are designed for a 3:2 screen. You can't just scale the app to the new aspect ratio without stretching assets (squares become rectangles, circles become ellipses), and iPhone apps are designed against a specific aspect ratio.
Increasing a 3:2 screen to 4.3" would make the screen 2.4" wide; the iPhone's screen is currently 1.9" wide, and the Sensation/SGS II have 2.1" wide screens, by comparison. If you think the SGS is hard to use, a 3:2 screen of the same size would be downright intolerable.
Phone weight is fairly meaningless limitation in these size ranges, so battery size is mostly limited by form factor - internal components so a larger screen should give you better battery to surface area ratio and thus longer life.
Given your 3.5" measurement, a 7" screen for the iPad would have been much better, would it have not?
Apple's not shipping a bigger phone yet because it's something they can hold back on until they need to do it. The iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5XL iPhone 6... one of these will eventually do it so as to sell you something new.
If we want a device that would be comfortably operable two-handed you still wouldn't have a 7" tablet - the 7" tablet would still have a huge swathe of dead zones where no finger can reach.
You'd have basically two iPhone screens next to each other, portrait - that gives us 4.9" diagonal, maybe a smidge wider would still work, but nowhere close to 7".
That's the only way to guarantee a comfortable reach for all screen locations. A 7" tablet is still way too large if the goal is complete two-hand operability. That's not a design goal of a table though, in its normal use case.
In any case, I have no problems against the 7" tablet form factor, so I'm not sure what the issue is.
Maybe that's why Apple is pushing for voice recognition with Siri.
I still think people like big screens on smartphones and thumbs be damned plus nobody seems to like voice recognition or Dragon Dictate would be on every PC.
People like voice recognition, but its uses are limited. I use voice search on my Android phone every time I get in the car to go somewhere that I need navigation to, or if I need a map. That's about it, though; having conversations with your phone makes you look rather special.
Maybe, just maybe, they factored in supply chains, costs and re-engineering effort and decided that it can happen later.
Sometimes you wonder why such speculative (not to mention defensive) articles get on the front page on HN. Aren't we supposed to be more rational and balanced?
> Aren't we supposed to be more rational and balanced?
Reddit has the same misconception. In reality, voting-based aggregators are at the whims of the user's personal feelings and preconceived beliefs, no matter the community guidelines.
HN has one nice benefit in that misleading titles can be changed, which I greatly appreciate.
Its interesting how much energy people are putting into shutting his observation down. It might make sense to ask someone at Apple how they decide on product dimensions for mobile devices. I'm pretty sure some thought goes into the size of their products.
My actually quite small hand, compared to a Logitech G7 and the SGSII. I'm guessing.. the guy made a guess compared to his iPhone4, without really using a SGS2, only seeing some.
Before getting it, I too though it might be too big. But nope. Using it since 6 month.
As long as the body is thin like the SGS2 its perfect. There's only a small region at the top right I can't reach and which I don't need to.
Also note that his graphic is wrong, as the SGSII is much higher, but not much wider than the iPhone (and thats probably why it works so well despite the size)
I don't think you read the article fully. The author has a SGS2 and while using it he realised that it was not as comfortable to reach the edges and corners as it was on an iPhone.
The reason the iPhone 4's screen is 3.5 inches is because the iPhone 3GS was 3.5 inches is because the iPhone 3G was 3.5 inches is because the original iPhone was 3.5 inches.
A consistent platform is a huge deal. The whole point of the iPhone is that it's touch friendly. Part of the iOS user interface guidelines is making sure touch areas are the size of a finger tip. This is heavily emphasized.
If there were different sized iPhone screens with incompatible aspect ratios this guideline would be meaningless. An app that has finger sized touch zones on a 4.3 inch widescreen phone would not on a 3.5 inch standard screen phone.
Apple's designers know this. It's on purpose. And Apple's designers decide what its devices look like. That's why the iPhone 4 has a 3.5 inch screen.
If you want to wonder why the original iPhone had a 3.5 screen, you've got to go back to 2007 when everyone else was still trying to copy the Blackberry. A 3.5 inch screen at that time was already unprecedented.
I don't doubt Apple prototypes iPhones with different screen sizes and there is pressure to upgrade. But the fact Apple has not just shows how reluctant it is to break with consistency. If Apple moves to a new screen size, I think it will have to be larger for backward compatibility with old apps. I highly doubt it will go smaller, ever. All old apps would suck on a smaller screen, and Apple doesn't deliver sucky user experiences. And if it does go larger, it will be a big deal. I wouldn't expect a new screen size for a long time after that.
Retina was Apple's "screen size upgrade" for the forseeable future. The devices like the Sensation and SGS II have screen resolutions of 800x480; 480x320 just wasn't going to look good next to them. Apple's stuck at 3.5" like you mentioned, so to compete with the new high-resolution (and larger screen, as a result) devices, they doubled the iPhone 4's resolution, which is a pretty decent compromise. One of the benefits of increasing resolution without increasing the display size is that your DPI skyrockets, and they jumped on that and marketed the crap out of it. The display looks "better", even if it's not larger. I would be genuinely surprised if Apple released an iPhone variant at >3.5". They might release an iPod Touch around ~3.75", but that's as high as they can really go before the 3:2 aspect ratio starts to make the device width prohibitive.
In order to maintain "Retina" display, they'd need to keep their 300 pixels per square inch or more density. That also doesn't leave them a whole lot of room to bump up the screen size without bumping up the resolution again. They've got some small room to play with in terms of the screen bezel though, so we could see a screen size bump without a resolution bump that still offered both the 300 ppi and the ability to touch all of the screen with one hand. (Think about some of the "iPhone 5" leaked images). Time will tell.
They can maintain that "retina" claim as long as the marketing department gets away with it. I think they can easily get away with that down to 200 pixels per inch or so (anecdata: I am myopic, but cannot really see the individual pixels on an iPad 1 Or current iPod touch)
I guess that the extra wiring needed for retina resolution means that you need more backlight to get the same display brightness. If so, one way to market a slightly larger display with say 250 pixels per inch would be by stressing it as having better battery life ('easier to see for the elderly' would work, too, but such a line does not fit Apple's image well)
They've also locked themselves into a resolution, in some sense. IPhone apps, unlike Android apps, are built using absolute coordinates. Developers can make assumptions about the width and height of the screen. And widths and heights are described, believe it or not, with floats, not ints. They've been able to maintain compatibility between devices because they've doubled the resolution every time they wanted to increase it. This has in some sense made life easier for developers, while it's allowed Apple to not build the UI abstractions that Android had to. It seems fundamentally unsustainable though, surely they can't keep doubling forever?
Does this mean that you haven't seen a desktop OS UI that doesn't look like crap? All desktop operating systems have to deal with different resolutions as they have to support different monitors. Even laptops generally have a video output for a second, unknown-sized monitor.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, fair call - you see this a lot in games, where the interface is based off static images - as you increase the resolution for better main view experience, the UI shrinks along with it, and it's tough if you like a high res main view but want larger control surfaces.
That being said, I have seen some games with nice UIs that scale appropriately with resolution, that is, changing resolution doesn't change the screen size of the controls. I can't for the life of me think of any at the moment - they're not that common, but they do exist.
OSX is not resolution independent, the UI shrinks when the resolution increases. This is not the case for Windows 7 (and older versions) though, dont know about Linux.
True, but it's the absolute size (in pixels) that matters on the desktop because the mouse (a pixel precise) pointing device is used. This becomes a problem on touch based devices with limited screen real estate where balancing info density and usability is crucial.
Yup. Today's smartphones (and even tablets) are pretty much rebadged PDAs. The only advances have been a stylus-less UI, a vastly improved image (PDAs are for stodgy business men), and realizing that a package manager is a really good idea.
That's like saying 'the only difference between driving a car and riding a horse is that you feed the horse hay'. Not having a stylus makes a world of difference, both in how easy it is to use (using a stylus sucks donkey balls, and I did it for 10 years (using a stylus, not sucking donkey balls)) and what you can do with it (e.g. swiping is, in practice, impossible with a stylus)
And the switch to non-stylus screens required vastly different screen tech, so it's not like Palm in the 1990's just made an unfortunate choice and they could've switched at any time.
I lost my PDA stylus years ago. Adjusted the setting slightly and my finger worked fine. Palm did not need any radical new tech to hypothetically make touch.
Apple did need a different tech (transparent capacitive touch) for multitouch. But stylus-less finger friendly touch screen interfaces were around for 20 years before the iPhone.
The multiple finger manipulation was innovative and an improvement. (Though the Synaptics touchpad driver permitted basic multi touch years earlier.) Finger-based UI was not innovative and has a long history before Apple.
I don't know about you, but before the iPhone, I hated touch screens. Before the iPhone, most people have only been exposed to touch via shitty kiosks, credit card readers and ATM machines.
I remember the skepticism around Jan 2007 when the iPhone was announced. They said, "Pure touch? No way. Won't work. You need to have a keyboard." I was one them! Even I said, "yeah, the UI is pretty, but the touch screen probably sucks." However, once I played around with my first iPhone, I bought one the next day based purely on the amazing performance of the touch keyboard.
Pure touch phones already existed in 2007 before the iPhone, but they sucked donkey balls. In fact, many of them still do. To downplay the iPhone's touch UI is disingenuous. To this day, the iPhone still has the best touch response on the market. Followed by WP7, WebOS, Android and lastly BB OS in that order. I own an iPhone, WP7 and a Nexus One and use them everyday. Typing on Android is like eating fried chicken with a chopstick.
Well I'm not sure what kind of PDA you were using then, but all the Palm, Handspring and various Linux ones (can't remember what they were called) that I used worked only with a finger when you used your nail, and even then there was no telling what exact 'touch point' the screen/OS was going to use.
It's much like today's TomTom devices. They are advertised as being 'touchscreen', and the UI is designed as such (with big buttons etc) but they're still a bitch to operate. I mistype at least 20% of my interactions with it, and like I mentioned I have a decade of experience with working around finicky touchscreen technology (as much as I hate to admit).
I'm not saying you or anyone else wasn't able to operate a previous-generation touch screen with their finger, but the experience simply wasn't good enough to make it mainstream. For example an on-screen keyboard is/was out of the question on a Palm.
Your prediction that Apple will not switch to a smaller screen size is illuminating...
The problem as I see it is that for marketing pressure they could switch to 4 inches displays, and the issue showed by the original poster is a bad one for smart users interacting with their device with just one hand (this is at least how I use it and how I see all my friends interacting with it).
Actually the iPhone software keyboard appears to be designed for a good one hand interaction since it works incredibly well even when you think you are putting your thumb in a too wide and imprecise area but actually you end pressing exactly the intended letter.
If there was a reason for the original display to be 3.5" is likely exactly that: the largest screen that is possible to get while preserving one hand interaction and reasonable size for holding it in your pocket.
A 3.5 inch screen at that time was already unprecedented.
Supposing that is true: so was a 3.6" screen. Your story does not explain why the 3.5" was initially chosen instead of 3.6".
It's not productive when a commenter completely ignores an argument and instead proposes his own theory, without considering that the arguments need not be mutually exclusive.
Hold an iPhone in your right hand with your fingers wrapped securely around the device. Now type Q with your thumb. It's perfectly comfortable for me. But if I try to reach literally any further, I can start feeling a tightness in the tendons of my thumb to stretch further.
It really is the perfect size for me, and I'm a 6'0" lumberjack of a human. Any bigger and it would be less comfortable to use.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadI think he's reading too much into the design. Larger isn't necessarily better. The iPhone 4's screen is good enough for me, I've never had any issues except for trying to read pdfs, which is one reason why I keep considering getting an iPad. But for everything else, I find the screen more than good enough and it's still small enough to fit in my pocket.
I think you got his argument backwards.
I could probably extend well past the edges of the Android phone, as well. So I don't think that "average thumb length" had anything to do with the size of the iPhone screen.
So, while I think the diagram is exaggerated, the writer does have a point. My guess is that the 3.5" screen works very well a very large percentage of adult hands (say 75%) and acceptably for, say, 95%. I think a 4" display would probably pull things out of the bell curve. I suspect given that Apple probably made a LOT of prototypes that the iPhone's screen size was determined empirically.
To me, the iPhone4 feels almost exactly right in terms of width (I think it could be up to half as thick without feeling flimsy).
That said, I would not buy an iPad again. I would by a Kindle instead. Just some food for thought regarding your PDF reading needs.
http://www.onyx-boox.com/onyx-boox-m91s
The one thing that android is missing out of course is the Appstore eco system, it has a long way to go to match software availability/quality of Apple appstore apps.
Camera in Samsung GS2 is probably best among android phones, but i dont think its a match for iPhone 4 and definitely not a match for iPhone 4S.
I may even buy the 4.2" is too large argument since devices do get a bit unwieldy, but why not anything between 3.5" & 4"? I own a Nexus One (3.7") and I think its a perfect size - I can usually reach my thumb across with minimal effort on a 4" screen as well.
tl:dr; Claims about perfect size of phone, without any data, except images of phones superimposed with one random sample of thumb size.
For a man? For a woman? For an American? For an Asian?
Ever considered those differences?
I fully understand there is most likely some of normal distribution of sizes, but that's a fact that the author seems to have largely ignored as well.
On an unrelated note, the site seems to be down.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you have 2-inch range of motion with your thumb, you shouldn't get anything larger than an iPhone and probably can't draw consistent diagrams.
He does not claim 'this size was chosen because my thumb is this large'. The blog post suggests: this size is chosen so the device can be used optimally by most of the population and he demonstrates the argument with his own thumb, without claiming it is therefore true.
Now you may very well be unconvinced by the argument and point out that you wonder whether there is any data available to test the suggestion and that it may be coincidental otherwise. However, that does not warrant the statement 'the diagrams are highly misleading'. It warrants 'the diagram may be misleading'.
I would like it very much if HN commenters would appreciate such subtleties and argue "I'm not sure you're right, because ...", instead of "You're wrong, because ...". His argument makes perfect sense and deserves to be recognized as such.
I think a lot of folks here are not actually considering how they hold their devices and can easily operate them. I have found over and over again that I can't reach the upper corner of the other side and have been annoyed I had to shift the device around in my hand to reach it (for instance while eating an apple with the other hand). I've dropped it once that way. I'm not small, I'm not clumsy. I don't have arthritis or any lack of agility in my hand. Of course I can reach the whole screen with my thumb, if I change the way I hold the device. The point is that you don't want that. The article makes perfect sense to me and completely stacks up with my experience of using my iPhone.
I hold my device resting on my fingers, not gripped in my hand. The first knuckle joint (i.e. the one closest to the fingernail) of my index and pinky fingers are aligned with the center line of the back of the device; the device is balanced on top of my fingers. This gives me the biggest range of movement over the surface of the device, and more importantly gives me better fine control over what my thumb hits - not only is thumb movement a factor, but fine finger movement as well. Adjusting the angle of holding the phone doesn't mean "shifting the device around in my hand" - it merely means changing the angle of my fingers.
I think a bigger factor in how the iPhone is better designed than most other phones is how touchscreen sensitivity drops off around the edges (if this behaviour is indeed deliberate). Before I moved to Android, I used to hold my device gripped between my fingertips and the center of my palm, but I found this didn't work as well with the Nexus One, because the sensitive edge of the touchscreen meant that the little fold of skin from my palm was creating phantom touches on the screen edge. So I stopped gripping my devices; I now hold them all resting on my fingers when I'm using the touchscreen.
"Median hand comfort" vs "maximum screen real estate" is probably something they at least toyed with.
Surely Apple would have done that on purpose!
I was looking at notebooks and thinking I want a big screen but with the keyboard in the center. I want my hands write in front of me, but I don't want to look to one side. I 'know' apple do it that way. Then I found an HP that was almost like that but the F was more left than the J was right, which are the home keys, so I thought still no good. Then I looked at the Apple and it was the same the F was more left that J was right. So I decided it must be right to do that, because Apple know best.
I like this typo, intentional or not!
The fact that you don't know if something specific happened does not mean that you cannot reason about the high possibility of it happening given the historical information you have available.
Given what we know about Apple, Ives et al, what exactly do you believe of the two:
1) Apple picked the dimensions at random or without thought 2) Apple studied to find the best compromise for the device's dimensions
I'm all for giving Apple's designs as much credit as possible, but it's still a far cry from even that to "wow this thing about the design I just noticed that works for me must have been something they considered for the populace at large."
Remember, Apple sells one basic body shape to its entire market. No single Android phone sells anything comparable to as many units as the iPhone. The body shape has to be usable for 95% of Apple's potential market, which includes everything from teenage girls to grown men. Apple undoubtedly thought about exactly the problem the author raised.
Statistical hand breadth is around 3.8-3.5 inches (men, women).
That's not what he's arguing. I can reach the pedals of my car with the seat all the way back, too, but I'll probably plow into someone as a result.
He's arguing that it's not comfortable to do so, and I agree. Stretching my thumb across the iPhone screen (top-left / top right) is as close to uncomfortable as I'd like to be. When my thumb is over there, the phone arches forward because of the position of my index finger, almost moving the phone out of my hand. Any larger of a screen and it'll go flying.
Whether or not Apple decided on the original screen size because of this, it was a good decision to not increase the size of the screen with the 4S.
EDIT: Spelling. I don't know why I mentioned "normal" either.Apple simply wants to cover a majority of users.
Specifically, the original iPhone was 1.1 mm narrower than iPods, and iPhone 4 is 3.2 mm narrower.
Android handsets are becoming ridiculous. We spent all this time trying to make things small, but in an effort to differentiate themselves, manufacturers started making things huge again.
Most of the high end phones would not even fit comfortably in my jeans pockets.
There's definitively a large market segment for whom the iPhone form factor is too small. Myself included - it was one of the big things that stopped me from getting one; I just can't type on the thing at a reasonable speed.
My HTC Desire HD is more than small enough to fit in my pocket, and rests comfortably in my hand, and I love having a decent sized display and I can actually type on it at a tolerable speed. I could easily handle a device a bit bigger than that with one hand, I might just get one because it reduces the number of situations where the screen is "too small" for it to be nice to use.
Most Android phones are increasing the screen size while decreasing the bezel, but only the increased screen size gets quoted. The next generation using Ice-Cream Sandwich, such as the Prime you mention, can replace the capacitive keys at the bottom with on-screen buttons, just like Honeycomb tablets. The screen size alone doesn't tell you everything about the device size.
This site shows a comparison (note you can click in the top right corner to resize the pictures to actual size)
http://versusio.com/en/google-nexus-prime-vs-apple-iphone-4-...
It's only slightly bigger, yet has nearly double the screen area.
They have not really decreased the bezel that much either. But area increases as a square so you get good returns.
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9100_galaxy_s_ii-pictures-3... http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_evo_3d-pictures-3901.php http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire_hd-pictures-3468.php http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s_ii_hd_lte-4198.php
I'd handled the HTC Desire HD a fair bit (someone at work has one). The opposite end of increasing as a square is that small increases are bigger than they sound. It's a lot of phone there.
I am sure a lot of people are fine with it.
If they could make everything edge to edge, I'l be right there with with.
That's one big advantage Android has over the iphone. Android can cater to different segments while the iphone is one-size-fits-all (literally and figuratively).
Compare to the iphone 4, which while being a nicer phone, has huge great lumps off the top and bottom of the screen - which means less pocketability / ease of management - not to mention that most iPhone 4s are even larger (and less attractive) due to the plastic bumper.
The form factor is what sold me on the defy over the first-class range of android phones, despite it being a bit underpowered and having one or two other issues, some of which were due to Motorola bloatware that went away when CM7 went on.
I find that in portable devices, getting the right size for you is a much underrated question when people look to buy tech.
Didn't get a Defy in the end, went for the still-cheaper ZTE Blade, but the new Defy+ is very tempting.
For what it is worth, iOS 5 helps with thumb typing on the iPad.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jXZtssY...
I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone's original screen size was dictated more by battery concerns than the average mobile thumb length of tea drinkers in the midwest or whatever crazy metric people want to use. Bigger screens use exponentially more energy. Once that size was decided, Apple's basically stuck with it, since iPhone apps use absolute layouts and are designed for a 3:2 screen. You can't just scale the app to the new aspect ratio without stretching assets (squares become rectangles, circles become ellipses), and iPhone apps are designed against a specific aspect ratio.
Increasing a 3:2 screen to 4.3" would make the screen 2.4" wide; the iPhone's screen is currently 1.9" wide, and the Sensation/SGS II have 2.1" wide screens, by comparison. If you think the SGS is hard to use, a 3:2 screen of the same size would be downright intolerable.
Apple's not shipping a bigger phone yet because it's something they can hold back on until they need to do it. The iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5XL iPhone 6... one of these will eventually do it so as to sell you something new.
There's a reason iOS5 features a "splittable" keyboard that brings all keys within thumb reach of both edges of the screen.
You'd have basically two iPhone screens next to each other, portrait - that gives us 4.9" diagonal, maybe a smidge wider would still work, but nowhere close to 7".
That's the only way to guarantee a comfortable reach for all screen locations. A 7" tablet is still way too large if the goal is complete two-hand operability. That's not a design goal of a table though, in its normal use case.
In any case, I have no problems against the 7" tablet form factor, so I'm not sure what the issue is.
I still think people like big screens on smartphones and thumbs be damned plus nobody seems to like voice recognition or Dragon Dictate would be on every PC.
Sometimes you wonder why such speculative (not to mention defensive) articles get on the front page on HN. Aren't we supposed to be more rational and balanced?
Reddit has the same misconception. In reality, voting-based aggregators are at the whims of the user's personal feelings and preconceived beliefs, no matter the community guidelines.
HN has one nice benefit in that misleading titles can be changed, which I greatly appreciate.
The iPhone is well designed.
Therefore they used a 3.5" screen.
Therefore the iPhone is well designed.
http://www.designingforhumans.com/idsa/anthropometric_data/
Before getting it, I too though it might be too big. But nope. Using it since 6 month. As long as the body is thin like the SGS2 its perfect. There's only a small region at the top right I can't reach and which I don't need to. Also note that his graphic is wrong, as the SGSII is much higher, but not much wider than the iPhone (and thats probably why it works so well despite the size)
'nuff said, here's the pic:
http://i.imgur.com/LFoIR.jpg
1. http://twitter.com/#!/dcurtis/status/121653781241921537
A consistent platform is a huge deal. The whole point of the iPhone is that it's touch friendly. Part of the iOS user interface guidelines is making sure touch areas are the size of a finger tip. This is heavily emphasized.
If there were different sized iPhone screens with incompatible aspect ratios this guideline would be meaningless. An app that has finger sized touch zones on a 4.3 inch widescreen phone would not on a 3.5 inch standard screen phone.
Apple's designers know this. It's on purpose. And Apple's designers decide what its devices look like. That's why the iPhone 4 has a 3.5 inch screen.
If you want to wonder why the original iPhone had a 3.5 screen, you've got to go back to 2007 when everyone else was still trying to copy the Blackberry. A 3.5 inch screen at that time was already unprecedented.
I don't doubt Apple prototypes iPhones with different screen sizes and there is pressure to upgrade. But the fact Apple has not just shows how reluctant it is to break with consistency. If Apple moves to a new screen size, I think it will have to be larger for backward compatibility with old apps. I highly doubt it will go smaller, ever. All old apps would suck on a smaller screen, and Apple doesn't deliver sucky user experiences. And if it does go larger, it will be a big deal. I wouldn't expect a new screen size for a long time after that.
I guess that the extra wiring needed for retina resolution means that you need more backlight to get the same display brightness. If so, one way to market a slightly larger display with say 250 pixels per inch would be by stressing it as having better battery life ('easier to see for the elderly' would work, too, but such a line does not fit Apple's image well)
Notice for example how the buttons in Android seem to have the wrong dimensions all the time, they sort of look chunky or stretched.
I think Apple made the right choice with solving this with resolution doubling.
That being said, I have seen some games with nice UIs that scale appropriately with resolution, that is, changing resolution doesn't change the screen size of the controls. I can't for the life of me think of any at the moment - they're not that common, but they do exist.
3.5 inch screens were a standard size for PDA screens.
That's like saying 'the only difference between driving a car and riding a horse is that you feed the horse hay'. Not having a stylus makes a world of difference, both in how easy it is to use (using a stylus sucks donkey balls, and I did it for 10 years (using a stylus, not sucking donkey balls)) and what you can do with it (e.g. swiping is, in practice, impossible with a stylus)
And the switch to non-stylus screens required vastly different screen tech, so it's not like Palm in the 1990's just made an unfortunate choice and they could've switched at any time.
I lost my PDA stylus years ago. Adjusted the setting slightly and my finger worked fine. Palm did not need any radical new tech to hypothetically make touch.
Apple did need a different tech (transparent capacitive touch) for multitouch. But stylus-less finger friendly touch screen interfaces were around for 20 years before the iPhone.
The multiple finger manipulation was innovative and an improvement. (Though the Synaptics touchpad driver permitted basic multi touch years earlier.) Finger-based UI was not innovative and has a long history before Apple.
I remember the skepticism around Jan 2007 when the iPhone was announced. They said, "Pure touch? No way. Won't work. You need to have a keyboard." I was one them! Even I said, "yeah, the UI is pretty, but the touch screen probably sucks." However, once I played around with my first iPhone, I bought one the next day based purely on the amazing performance of the touch keyboard.
Pure touch phones already existed in 2007 before the iPhone, but they sucked donkey balls. In fact, many of them still do. To downplay the iPhone's touch UI is disingenuous. To this day, the iPhone still has the best touch response on the market. Followed by WP7, WebOS, Android and lastly BB OS in that order. I own an iPhone, WP7 and a Nexus One and use them everyday. Typing on Android is like eating fried chicken with a chopstick.
It's much like today's TomTom devices. They are advertised as being 'touchscreen', and the UI is designed as such (with big buttons etc) but they're still a bitch to operate. I mistype at least 20% of my interactions with it, and like I mentioned I have a decade of experience with working around finicky touchscreen technology (as much as I hate to admit).
I'm not saying you or anyone else wasn't able to operate a previous-generation touch screen with their finger, but the experience simply wasn't good enough to make it mainstream. For example an on-screen keyboard is/was out of the question on a Palm.
The problem as I see it is that for marketing pressure they could switch to 4 inches displays, and the issue showed by the original poster is a bad one for smart users interacting with their device with just one hand (this is at least how I use it and how I see all my friends interacting with it).
Actually the iPhone software keyboard appears to be designed for a good one hand interaction since it works incredibly well even when you think you are putting your thumb in a too wide and imprecise area but actually you end pressing exactly the intended letter.
If there was a reason for the original display to be 3.5" is likely exactly that: the largest screen that is possible to get while preserving one hand interaction and reasonable size for holding it in your pocket.
It's not productive when a commenter completely ignores an argument and instead proposes his own theory, without considering that the arguments need not be mutually exclusive.
It really is the perfect size for me, and I'm a 6'0" lumberjack of a human. Any bigger and it would be less comfortable to use.
http://grantland.me/dcurtis_small_thumbs.png