I agree that I think I would prefer a 5" phone to a 6" phone. That said, there's no law requiring the keyboard to scale with phone size. For example, this[0] iOS (software) keyboard only fills the screen where it is easily accessible by your right or left thumb. Now if you're stochastically ambidextrous, well... I don't know what to tell you!
Yeah sure, I understand that use case. I personally wish Apple had kept the 6 at the original form factor and made the larger phone as-is to give real choice. The way they did it was "go bigger" or "go biggerer" and I get that there are people who really do just want the smaller form factor for whatever reason.
Okay, so I did have a moment the other day where I wanted to text somebody but one of my hands was full and so I made the extremely difficult decision to wait 5 minutes until I was in a better place to do what I wanted. There was another case a couple weeks ago that was similar, but I just used the speech recognition to type the texts out for me (a pattern I'm getting more and more into even when I can comfortably type anyways).
You can't use speech recognition on public transport.
And this line "so I made the extremely difficult decision to wait 5 minutes until I was in a better place to do what I wanted" sounds a lot like "you're holding the phone wrong".
I think there are software improvements that you can make though. Apple's Reachability feature is a step in the right direction. But not enough.
> You can't use speech recognition on public transport.
Sure, that's why I just waited the 5 minutes instead. It wasn't all that long ago that people waited weeks or months for responses to a correspondence, waiting a few minutes isn't the end of the world, somehow humanity got along just fine waiting a little. I already don't answer my phone if it's not convenient (it's why they invented voice mail).
There's some keyboards I suppose I could hunt around and install if I really need to text that very second.
While I'm at it I suppose I could just get a subvocal mic so I can talk to my texting app while on a bus.
If the phone is in "letter" orientation the keyboard would be entirely reachable... Do some of us want to respond to a text message with the phone/keyboard in landscape mode with one hand? That would seem a bit tough with any recent smart phone.
Some of us would like to be able to respond to a text message while carrying something, for example.