About fruitless attempts to find a decent and compact smartphone. Developers, hello!
Back in the good old days of 'dumb' Java phones, when screen size wasn’t ruled by screen size, tiny phones could only be made by real A-brands. The then young company Samsung, which was trying to keep up with the leaders, turned out the same thing, but thicker, longer, heavier. The reviewers of the phones paid more attention to the clear stroke of the keys and whether they were staggering, and the readers mentally tried on a beautiful hanging, which they would hang in a special hole in the case. The days of hangs and holes are gone, and modern push-button telephones are swollen and larger than their ancestors. Nobody is chasing phone miniaturization anymore. Paradox? Of course, this is a paradox, because there are objective physical parameters, such as the length of the fingers and the width of the palm, and you cannot close your eyes to this. They are trying to convince us that it is quite normal to hold a smartphone with both hands, and many, trusting the manufacturer and non-resistance from the public, begin a long road of torment. The human body is very adaptive, and over time, the brain will surely deceive its wearer by making fingers unnaturally curled on a smartphone a habitual scenario, and not a temporary inconvenience. Big smartphones will come back to haunt all of us later, they will lead to negative health consequences with the same inevitability as other constantly repetitive actions with uncomfortable use of the skeleton. Think of the slouching shoulders of copywriters and the chronically dislocated shoulders of snipers, the same will happen with our fingers.
Now there is not and cannot be any statistics on this score (too little time has passed since the appearance of 'smartphones-shovels'), but there are simple and understandable arguments, logical and sound.
The ancestor of ape and man …
… would never use a phablet. There is a hypothesis, not proven in any way, that the appearance of reason in a common ancestor of man and a monkey was accompanied by the beginning of his combat and labor activity with the use of foreign objects.
The left thumb on the palm of a highly developed monkey turned a stick into a spear or club. But even a monkey would not think of using a log as a tool, which it cannot hold with one hand. So why does modern man do this?
Substitution of concepts and 'tuftalogy'
Modern advertising and marketing have changed the human perception of the phone as a whole object. This happened, apparently, when in real time it became possible to demonstrate to a large audience the innovative successes of individual elements of the smartphone. To put it more simply, when the seller climbed onto the barrel and began to talk about the power and battery of the smartphone and not talk about the shortcomings. It is about saturating the Internet space with a large number of potential buyers and the appearance of the first cross-platform benchmarks, which immediately scattered the attention of individuals. Looking at the technical characteristics of the device in the next review, we already have a rough idea of its performance, screen quality and battery life. Behind the abundance of numbers, the very essence of the question is somehow hidden: 'Is it possible to use such a smartphone specifically for me? So that he does not fall out of hands? '. And even looking at the 'Dimensions' column, we do not realize what the parameter 'width 75 mm' means. Or any other number.
The most that a user of independent information resources can count on is statistics or useless pictures (image above), which can be interpreted as desired (in fact, as beneficial to the customer of statistics). But no one will ever give practical advice on which smartphone sizes are the most optimal for a normal person and how to determine them. This is what we will do.
Convenient convenience
Check right now how much your smartphone is comfortable. To do this, take your smartphone in your hand and try to touch the tips of your thumb and middle fingers. Did not work out?
In such cases, remember your childhood, my mother used to say: 'Hold the cup with both hands, otherwise you will drop it.' People forget about it, hold a modern smartphone with one hand and drop it. Dropped on the asphalt, dropped into ponds, dropped just like that or because of the rain-soaked and slippery back cover. And in order not to drop and securely hold the smartphone with one hand, it is necessary to cover it from all sides, 'close the ring'. So, here's a recipe for all time (from human ancestor (100 million years ago) to tomorrow):
We apply a regular ruler along the thumb, as indicated in the image above, and move it until discomfort (pain) appears. Taking into account the unmarked area of the ruler from the edge, we get the conditional maximum width of the gadget, which is convenient for this particular hand, which is 65 mm. By this parameter, we will try to choose a smartphone.
To the store
The bitter truth is that there is not a single good smartphone on the market for this, albeit medium-sized, but not at all rare hand.
Apparently, the manufacturers found the consumer's common sense completely defeated. If you add support for 4G and NFC to the selection parameters, then there will be only two smartphones, one of which is an Xperia XZ1 Compact (used), and the second is a thick one Android – a RUNBO E81 radio with always on speakerphone in due to the lack of a special conversational (quiet) speaker.
The sleek Palm PVG100 looks like a good offer, but only until we first look under the lid and then at the price tag. If we don’t understand the first time, then we will do it again.
You cannot find a suitable smartphone abroad either. Some hope was given by the compact smartphone Xiaomi Qin 2, which appeared in the news in the fall and is still on sale.
The hope was that the basic version of Qin 2 would be followed by a 'Pro', with a good processor and at least 2-3 GB of RAM, but this did not happen. The comfortable width of the case (55 mm), the infrared port and the outstanding design of the key block at the end, as they say, do not 'justify'.
Conclusion
Sadness, sadness, irritation – these are the feelings you experience when you know exactly what you want and cannot get it. It remains only to put up with gigantomania, which is artificially imposed on us, and hope that this is a temporary phenomenon.
Friends, tell us in the comments how long did it take you to get used to modern huge smartphones? Do you agree that the side of a smartphone in cross-section should be square with rounded edges (as in iPhone 4), and not beveled? How often have your smartphone been dropped due to its size?