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Originally Posted by SeaKing
I hope I haven't contributed to the demise of other iPhone 5 threads and have had no warnings, but still I am going to tread very carefully here.
Who is buying the iPhone 5? Is it the old customers or is it a new group that hasn't had a iPhone before. I ask because it is a radical shift from the old standard that has been present in all the other "fantastic" magical machines with their perfectly sized ergonomic 3.5" screens.
Are the people buying the iPhone 5, buying it to gain the new larger screen, or is that something they are just putting up with in order to get these other incremental changes that have been detailed above.
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My guess is that there are a fair number of first-time smartphone buyers or ex-Android users who are picking up the iPhone. We won't really know until we see market share statistics. Surely, a huge number of purchasers already owned an iPhone and are upgrading.
As for their reasons... they are manifold. No need to pick just one. It's a great all-around upgrade.
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True the width is the same (I think) so the average thumb can sweep across the screen at least in one direction, but the height could create a demand for thumb gymnastics, reaching all the way to the top.
How is that working out. Any users? Any reports.
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Reactions are mixed.
Jim Dalrymple says it's just as useable as before:
"If the screen is so big that you can’t comfortably operate the iPhone 5 with one hand, then Apple would have failed.
But they didn’t. I am able to easily navigate through the iPhone 5 menus and options using one hand. My thumb reaches the top of the screen to tap on options and hit the back button without shuffling the phone in my hand."
John Gruber says it's not as convenient as the 3.5" model, which is his ideal size:
The bigger display is a total win while using the iPhone 5 two-handed. But navigating the full screen while holding the iPhone in one hand is worse, for exactly the one reason why, even one year ago, I did not expect Apple ever to increase the size of the iPhone display: my thumb no longer easily reaches from corner to corner. (My hands are at least somewhat larger than average. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, this issue will not be noticed by the smaller-handed, whose thumbs don’t easily stretch from corner to corner even on a 3.5-inch iPhone display.)
Consider the windshield wipers on a car, and how, because they swing in a radial arc, they can’t reach the passenger-side top corner. Using the iPhone 5 is like that. There are two specific touch targets where this gives me trouble, both of which I invoke frequently. First, back buttons in the top left corner. I keep mis-tapping underneath them with my fully-outstretched thumb and then need to subtly re-grip the phone so that my thumb can reach. Second, tapping the status bar to scroll to the top of the current view. The top-left back-button issue is only a problem when holding the iPhone 5 one-handed in my right hand, but, I’m right-handed and so that’s the hand I tend to use it with.
There’s a reason Apple emphasizes typing in its justification for why the iPhone 5 display is larger but not too large:
Anyone can make a larger smartphone display. But if you go large for large’s sake, you end up with a phone that feels oversize, awkward, and hard to use. iPhone 5 features a 4-inch display designed the right way: it’s bigger, but it’s the same width as iPhone 4S. So everything you’ve always done with one hand — typing on the keyboard, for instance — you can still do with one hand.
Typing on the iPhone 5 does feel exactly the same. And in my experience testing big-screen phones (mostly with the 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus), it really is far more difficult to do anything on them one-handed, including typing. And I can reach top-left-corner back buttons and the status bar one-handed with the 5, it just isn’t as easy, and requires an ever-so-slightly different choked up grip on the device than I’ve used for the past five years."
Most big blog writers are used to the 4.5"+ screens of Android phones and have not complained about screen size, as far as I know, except to say that it's too small (!).
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My lady friend is waiting to see if they put the larger screens in new iPods. Is that going to happen?
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Already has.