EnbySpacePerson

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

The idea that anyone wanted an even thinner phone is absurd. Sometimes people don't know they want something else until you give them a new option. Thinner phones solve a problem that does not exist.

What we want is:

• Ergonomically-sized phones — you can have your increasingly absurdly sized phablets but you can't keep driving screen sizes in this direction where no one can use a normal smartphone with one hand.
• Reasonable interfaces — I will come back to this.
• Either good battery performance over the total reasonable life of the device OR user swappable batteries — I'm talking swap 'em out like a TF card or AAs. Not “find the nearest person who has a kit from iFixit”!

Our current devices aren't suited to how we want to use them. The new use cases implied by the absurdity shoved down our throats is something no reasonable person would want or ask for.

And our existing interfaces at these current, bloated screen sizes are really really bad. Basic functionality is hidden behind edge swipes. What those swipes do is poorly communicated to users. (Fortunately, the apps I use with this type of functionality helpfully offer the user the ability to undo whatever was just done but that's my sole concession on this point.) Scrolling a long article requires tediously moving every inch of that article by your view port manually. Many buttons require the fingertip of a child in order to consistently activate them accurately. I could write an essay about how bad autocorrect is in the Year of Our Lady 2025. At one point, I had a “conspiracy theory” that autocorrect was this bad because companies were trying to force us into using voice controls. However, the voice controls are as bad as autocorrect.

We don't need or want thinner phones. We need hardware that's made for human hands and human needs. At this point, even having operating systems which are reasonably good would be a huge improvement.

#Technology