I just got a new Pixel 7a a few days ago. I specifically got that one to get the smallest of the bunch. It’s advertised as the smallest (and cheaper) model, phone size comparisons showed it to be indeed smaller than most competing devices and it’s even listed in some “best small phones” lists.
Now it’s here and it’s massive. If I keep the pinkie below the phone, I literally can’t reach the top of the screen at all, which is the entire notification bar - and my fingers are long! It’s annoying me to the point of being just about to return it to get something like the s22 or s23, just to save those 6mm of height - which is ridiculous, as it’d end up costing me a hundred bucks extra and I won’t get the free buds pro. I’ve been using Android since the G1 and outright refused to even consider anything else over years… But now I’m thinking about the iPhones 13 mini and se, just because I’m able to use them with one hand.
I want to like this device. So, could you people please tell me if I’m… Dunno, just doing it wrong? Like, not getting it or something? How do you pull down the notification bar in apps with one hand? How do you post those top-left buttons to close your current view? Enlighten me, please!
/edit Just in case anybody still sees this: I returned it. Went back to my s10e, which is eol and needs a charge in the afternoon, which is still annoying me less than that massive piece of hardware.
I have a Samsung S10+ (I dunno what I’m doing here). I just measured my thumb to pinky distance when doing a hang ten gesture, and it’s about 20cm/8 inches. My phone is about 1/2cm taller than yours. I can reach the notification bar and pull it down one handed, but I think there’s a bit of technique to it. If you describe your fingers as long, maybe you need better technique?
That’s what she said?
Jones aside, as I said, I tend to rest the phone on my pinkie. That way, I don’t need to “grab” it but it just kinda lays in my hand. This way, I can’t also comfortably reach the bottom buttons, which gets annoying if I hold the phone more in its middle by simply grabbing it.
So, maybe the point is not to get a phone that lets me reach the notification bar one handedly (which also works on the 7a, yes) but that this phone doesn’t allow me to reach the whole screen, top to bottom, without adjusting how I hold it.
It’s not a complete solution, but I like one-handed mode. When it’s active, swiping down on the bottom center of the screen makes the whole screen slide down, making the notification shade easier to get to.
See, I loved one handed mode on my s10e. That resized the whole screen to the bottom left or bottom right, allowing me to easily reach all elements, when I double-tapped the home button.
The pixel takes a completely different route. First, it’s a gesture that doesn’t work if you have the system buttons activated, which I have. Swiping down in the bottom area does nothing if the system buttons are shown and there’s no alternative on screen gesture (like double-tapping home). The alternative is to hold the volume buttons for a second or so, which just kind of feels slow… you do something, then you need to access the top of the screen and just look at your phone for a second while you wait for it to recognize the buttons being pressed and held. It just feels weird and kind of takes you out of the “flow” of doing stuff with your phone. Second (and more importantly) the pixel does its one-handed mode like iPhones do: it simply moves everything down about half of the screen. That gives you access to the top of the screen but shifts the whole bottom of your UI area off-screen, so unlike on Samsungs, where you can essentially work in one-handed mode 100% (at the cost of having UI elements being smaller than usually, so you sometimes mis-click), you need to constantly switch between regular and one-handed mode, which is annoying - doubly so with system buttons, which force you to wait a second to turn on one-handed mode.
So yes, there is kind of a solution, but I don’t think it works too well.
/edit Just found out you can enable a button to show up above the system buttons that enables one-handed mode. That’s actually great and kind of redeems a lot of problems I have. Nice!
It’s advertised as the smallest
Is that actually the case? I’ve never seen them mention size in their advertising (one way or the other) and I have never considered anything after the Pixel 5 as normal sized. Yeah, they’re all big, some more than others.
Okay, so they don’t call it small, granted. They do advertise the screen sizes quite prominently tough, saying “these are our three phone options and the first, bold thing we show is the size”. But yeah, they don’t call it small, the tech journalists do.
