71–78 of 78 posts
The elephant in the room is that unlike on android phones, there is no hardware 'back' button on iPhone. Where is it instead (by convention)? The top left corner of the screen, ie, the most unreachable place on the new iPhone. I'm still amazed this thing was produced by Apple given that oversight.
A nice benefit for us left-handed people though.
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Exactly: an iPhone 4 is to my girlfriend's hand nearly exactly as a Galaxy Note is to mine. The idea that people make these reachability arguments as if hand size is universal down to silly half-inch increments is downright insane.
Have you ever heard the phrase 'optimise for the common case'?
Put simply, the issue is that no one actually has the "common case": the probability that someone's hand span exactly matches the "average" or "mean" of the distribution is approximately 0.
Instead, we have to first discretize the variable into a histogram and then assign a common case afterwards. The way you normally might do that is with standard deviations. However, now you have to ask "what is the variance".
With hand size, it is quite obviously very large: again, my girlfriend's hand is to an iPhone 4 as my hand is to a Galaxy Note, and people generally do not go around calling either of us freaks of nature with regards to our hands (I actually have fairly effeminate hands ;P).
I will therefore repeat with emphasis: the idea that people make these reachability arguments as if hand size is universal down to silly half-inch increments is downright insane. However, I will now show some data.
http://www.steinbuhler.com/assets/images/HandSizeChartNewWeb...
This chart comes from a piano company measuring hand span for purposes of optimal piano sizing (concentrating on people whose hands have already finished growing). (Their conclusion, btw, was that they needed to sell a few more piano sizes.)
Now, this is full hand span; however, as your hand is fixed in the middle by the thing you are holding, you won't get this full spread, but I would easily argue that you will get at least half of this spread in that case.
The result, as you can see, is that there is a very very large range of reasonable values: hands are really not that common; you might think you have a common hand, but you really don't: hand span varies by numerous inches.
(There are multiple factors for this, of course: it isn't just hand size; you also have to take into account flexibility of joints, muscle strength, etc.; even if everyone's hands were the same size, the ability to reach the upper-corner of a device would vary a lot.)
I will then argue that even if you want to just attack a lot of people, and still fail for numerous others, you need to at least be making a device for women and a device for men: the difference between genders is really striking in that chart.
However, most people don't argue things like this: they accept that there are massive variations in the size of peoples' feet, hands, torsos, and pretty much every other body part, and this is why we don't just sell one-size-fits-all clothing.
Apple, FWIW, would not only be selling a single size of jeans, they would claim that they had optimized the size of the jeans to fit some optimal size, and their user community would then defend them with diagrams that show variances of less than half an inch for how perfect the fit is.
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Did you? He also said "the software benefits that come from that extra half an inch hugely improve the experience of using the phone." That's certainly praise, possibly even glowing. The criticism here seems reasonable. He went from discussing a "huge downside of larger screens" to saying that a bigger screen "hugely" improves the experience. Oh, and previously the smaller screen was "one of the things that makes App…
That he thinks slightly larger is potentially a good thing doesn't make it an inconsistent belief that hugely larger is not a good thing.
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That he thinks slightly larger is potentially a good thing doesn't make it an inconsistent belief that hugely larger is not a good thing.
It's pretty inconsistent when 4 inches is "slightly larger" for Apple but 4 inches is "hugely larger" for anyone else.
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It's pretty inconsistent when 4 inches is "slightly larger" for Apple but 4 inches is "hugely larger" for anyone else.
Except the the difference is 0.5 inches between 4S and 5, vs 1.3" difference between 4S and S3.
Also the phone screen he was comparing against (S II) was only 0.8 inches larger, at 4.3 inches.
The elephant in the room is that unlike on android phones, there is no hardware 'back' button on iPhone. Where is it instead (by convention)? The top left corner of the screen, ie, the most unreachable place on the new iPhone. I'm still amazed this thing was produced by Apple given that oversight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever heard the phrase 'optimise for the common case'?
"Have you ever heard of 'variance'?" The "common case" makes sense when you are dealing with a discrete variable that has a mode (a single highly common value): it does not make as much sense for a continuous one like hand span. Put simply, the issue is that no one actually has the "common case": the probability that someone's hand span exactly matches the "average" or "mean" of the distribution is approximately 0. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either... Any? While the Galaxy Nexus has onscreen navigation controls now (and the Nexus7 followed suit), both the One X and the Samsung Galaxy SIII have dedicated capacitive back buttons "off screen". On the OneX the button is in the normal place (on the left) and is oddly (but in keeping with the SII) on the right on the SIII.
You can still support it sure, but the recommendation from google is to move away from them on phones. IIRC (don't quote me) on tablets, it's a requirement.
