Comment by walterbell

9 months ago

2026 iPhone Fold is rumored iPhone Mini size unfolding to iPad Mini size.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/04/28/iphone-18-fold-details-launch...

Folding phones don't solve the problem of oversized phones, which is that they are awkward and cumbersome to use.

  • Some customers want a phone the size of iPhone Mini, rumored to be sold for $2K+ by Apple in 2026.

    • Hmmm, so there will be decent small screens produced in 2026, and it would be feasible to make small phones around them?

  • > they are awkward and cumbersome to use.

    For you. As someone with large hands, I appreciate that phones grew in size and I swapped to larger devices as soon as I could.

    • For... well, most people. Half of people are women, so I don't know how they do it. I'm a man, with man hands, and modern phones are not one hand operable. You need two hands. Even if you can do a particular operation with one hand, the phone is unsteady and it's awkward.

      I think people with large hands are definitely the minority. So, we're not optimizing for hand size. We're optimizing for engagement, I think.

      7 replies →

    • At 193 cm in height, I have large hands too. I currently use a Zenfone 10 and a Galaxy S10e before that, and I can grip them both just fine in one hand, but I can't also control them with that same hand without awkward contortions and a reliance on gravity.

      The only phones I've had that I could comfortably use one-handed were my old BlackBerry Q10 (2013) and BlackBerry Classic (2014). The Q10 because it's short enough to hold between my thumb and ring finger such that I could use my index and middle fingers on the touch screen (slightly unorthodox but it worked really well), and the larger Classic because it has an optical thumbpad and excellent software support for it (it was so good I rarely used the touch screen at all). And both had physical keyboards.

    • I don't have especially small hands and I can't stand my Nokia XR20 (which isn't even close to the biggest phone out there). If I can't reach every corner of the screen with my thumb while holding the phone, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant to use. Sadly that is most phones these days.

I hope they instead (or also) make a flip version opening up to at most the size of a regular iPhone.