It’s really easy to make a new product that is bigger, everyone does that. That’s not the challenge. The challenge is to make it better and smaller. – Phil Schiller
Once again, as with every over-hyped Apple event, there is a wave of disappointment rippling through the interwebs over the announcement of the iPhone 5. “Why isn’t the screen wider (or larger)?” seems to be the most common complaint, given that many competitors already offer phones with screen sizes varying from 4.5″ up to 7″.
But do you really want a wider screen? The answer should be no. For most people, the current iPhones are just wide (or narrow, depending on how you perceive things) enough to hold comfortably in one hand. While holding it in one hand, my thumb is just able to reach the “Q” character on the soft keyboard (without over stretching) when texting from my iPhone. And that is the way I like it – most other phones with wider screens that I’ve tried are too wide to type with one hand and too narrow to type with two. With that in mind, it is impossible to make a screen much larger than 4″ without making it ridiculously tall – and there are already some complaints where the top of the screen is slightly too tall to reach comfortably with one hand.
As a current owner of an iPhone 4 and being fully eligible for a re-contract, upgrading to the iPhone 5 (when it is available in Singapore) is a no brainer. It offers me the full features of iOS 6, many of which I would not be able to enjoy on my iPhone 4 (such as Facetime over cellular network and turn-by-turn navigation, just to name a few). It also offers a substantial increase in performance, theoretically up to 4x the CPU performance and over 10x the graphics performance over the iPhone 4, as well as faster cellular network speeds (support for 4G LTE), a dramatically improved camera and longer battery life.
Update: And so I got one.