Hacker News Reader

Comment by WizzleKake | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone wants to use both hands.

Some of us would like to be able to respond to a text message while carrying something, for example.

I agree that I think I would prefer a 5" phone to a 6" phone. That said, there's no law requiring the keyboard to scale with phone size. For example, this[0] iOS (software) keyboard only fills the screen where it is easily accessible by your right or left thumb. Now if you're stochastically ambidextrous, well... I don't know what to tell you!

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/14/iphone-6-plus-one-handed-ke...

Yeah sure, I understand that use case. I personally wish Apple had kept the 6 at the original form factor and made the larger phone as-is to give real choice. The way they did it was "go bigger" or "go biggerer" and I get that there are people who really do just want the smaller form factor for whatever reason.

Okay, so I did have a moment the other day where I wanted to text somebody but one of my hands was full and so I made the extremely difficult decision to wait 5 minutes until I was in a better place to do what I wanted. There was another case a couple weeks ago that was similar, but I just used the speech recognition to type the texts out for me (a pattern I'm getting more and more into even when I can comfortably type anyways).

You can't use speech recognition on public transport.

And this line "so I made the extremely difficult decision to wait 5 minutes until I was in a better place to do what I wanted" sounds a lot like "you're holding the phone wrong".

I think there are software improvements that you can make though. Apple's Reachability feature is a step in the right direction. But not enough.

> You can't use speech recognition on public transport.

Sure, that's why I just waited the 5 minutes instead. It wasn't all that long ago that people waited weeks or months for responses to a correspondence, waiting a few minutes isn't the end of the world, somehow humanity got along just fine waiting a little. I already don't answer my phone if it's not convenient (it's why they invented voice mail).

There's some keyboards I suppose I could hunt around and install if I really need to text that very second.

While I'm at it I suppose I could just get a subvocal mic so I can talk to my texting app while on a bus.

https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/c8e1/

I use speech recognition far more than typing on my Note 2 which is about the same size as a nexus 6.

Don't buy a Nexus 6, then? That doesn't take away from bane's point.

If the phone is in "letter" orientation the keyboard would be entirely reachable... Do some of us want to respond to a text message with the phone/keyboard in landscape mode with one hand? That would seem a bit tough with any recent smart phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com