Clown Sized Phone

Despite my earlier misgivings, I got a biggie size phone – the iPhone 8 Plus.  After lots of research and analysis, I realized an error in my previous logic.  I said:

It loses the magic of convenience that is so important to me in the iPhone.

That seems now to be a matter of perspective.  Yes, you lose convenience of always having your phone in your skinny jeans.  And yes, you lose convenience of easily reaching every corner of the screen with one hand.  But is that all “convenience” is about?  I also said:

when I got my 5s, I immediately wished it was a tiny bit wider to make landscape use more viable.  Typing any document in landscape only left me with about half an inch of displayed space.

So with a smaller phone, I actually gave up the convenience of seeing more of my document/ssh session in order to keep single-thumb use… and with any context that requires a bigger display I probably wouldn’t use a single thumb anyway.

With a larger phone, it seems that I don’t strictly need to use landscape in order to benefit from this.  I just have more to work with.

And, in landscape mode, the phone absorbs some of the power of the iPad.  The OS presents extra columns of information, panels that weren’t visible before are now on-screen.  This is called a “regular size class” to iOS developers (vs a “compact size class”), and it’s amazing, and frustratingly obscure.  I had to actually own one of these to get why it’s so different.  Side note: the iPhone X does NOT have the regular size class in landscape.  It’s just as cramped as ever even though it has loads of extra pixels available.  For “horns”.

Even including the onscreen keyboard, I have at least 5 usable lines to enter text.  With an external keyboard I have way more.

So, bottom line.  Is it convenient?  No, definitely not.  But is it convenient?  Oh yeah, definitely.  Maybe I’m one version behind everyone else, but I really like this format.