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Let’s re-invent small phones! Small screens! And rubber buttons!

What do I press for 'self-destruct'?

Something for the Weekend, Sir? “You know what they say about people with small hands?” Yes I do: according to the Museum of Carry On Jokes, they are favoured by women with small breasts. Or men with a tiny schmeckel.

It must be frustrating to be excluded from high society for having smaller-than-average hands. For example, did you notice the glaring paucity of small-handed actors at the recent Oscars? There were no nominations for films such as Small Hand Luke or Edward Smallerhands, oh no. And every time they introduced a star to announce the winners, the audience was shamelessly invited to give them “a big hand”.

So it is pleasing to see a major smartphone manufacturer – Apple, in this case – go out of its way to service the smaller handed among us with slightly shrunken handsets. The iPhone SE is an important step forward in taking product design, er, backward to enhance accessibility.

Here at El Reg, we referred to it as the “Donald Trump iPhone”. The Dump doesn’t have small hands as such but he does suffer from fat stubby fingers. This is not intended as an insult, it’s just that he does. In fact, they’re so fat and stubby, they are barely fingers at all. The Trump has tendrils. This is a man who probably drinks beer from bottles because pint glasses are too wide to pick up.

Before things get too disable-ist, remember that The Dump is not small-handed by choice: he does not waggle his chubby, anemone-like feelers around on purpose in order to upset people blessed with long, slender digits. I write from experience: I myself have on occasion been dismissed as a “short-arse”, as if I go about deliberately being short at taller people out of sheer dwarfish malice.

My worry is that smaller smartphones will not help people such as The Dump in the slightest. The handset might be easier to pick up and hold but the correspondingly smaller touchscreen will inevitably be harder to use. People with fat fingers need bigger, not smaller, buttons to jab away at. And this affects those with huge hands just as much.

I used to work with an art editor whose hands were the size of hams, with fingers the diameter of guttering pipe. He was a wonderful fellow but those massive digits were a problem. I had to ask him not to drum his fingers when bored because the resulting vibration was causing objects on my desk to judder and fall off the edge.

On one occasion, the editor, publisher and managing director were crowded around his desk for a magazine cover meeting, during which they suggested various headlines for him to type in. It was funny at first. One of them would say “How about ‘RED HOT PCs’?” and he’d start typing with his fat fingers:

RREWSDXC HYUBOIKL9TFFU PO0CXDFVXS

“No, no, try again. ‘RED HOT...”

456TFDE0HYTUFVO98TGH45

“Er, ‘RED’...?”

RWHYBERUY

“Could you type just the first ‘R’?”

T5R4G

It was bad enough asking him to delete the nonsense that he’d typed in: each tap of the Backspace key with his half-crown-sized fingertips also added a plus and curly bracket, caused the document to PageUp and invoked the F10 Help menu. At this point, I took over keyboard duties while the art editor contented himself with the mouse. Thank goodness Mac mice in those days had just the one button.

Just imagine him with an iPhone SE: his thumb tip alone would smother the entire display.

Besides, if you want a diddy little phone, you can still buy them from any phone shop. I bought one for my Mum a year ago to replace her 15-year-old old Nokia that had recharging problems. I took great pains to pick an almost identical handset in size and shape, with identical buttons, rinky-dinky display and even the classic Nokia menu. Unfortunately, despite just about everything about it being the same as her old phone, the new handset is bright blue, which means she can’t possibly work out how to use it.

[Small handset? Now you’re talking: my Mum’s nearly-used mobile phone]

I confess to having a similar problem with remote controls for the TV, Sky box, Blu-ray player, Playstation, Amazon Fire HD Stick and hi-fi in the living room. We have tried on a couple of occasions to replace all these handsets with one of those multi-device remote control replacements but we can never get used to them. You point it at the telly and press the button to change channel and the disc tray ejects from the Blu-ray player instead; you try to start a film only for the audio volume to shoot up to maximum; you press the red button and the Sky box switches to the Red Hot PCs channel and immediately begins downloading Data Managers’ Wives 6.

At least with multiple remote controls, we can use the manufacturer’s logo to work out which one is which. With a third-party device controlling everything, whatever button we think we’ve pressed, it seems to trigger something else entirely.

Indeed, half-lifey wifey has experienced more than her fair share of bad luck in this respect with her mobile phones over the years. Every now and again, she will ask whether I can help to fix something on her phone, and of course I do the patronising blokey “what have you done now?” expression as she hands it over. And without fail, I see for myself that her phone will have done something utterly inexplicable.

We’re not talking missing messages or accidentally deleted contacts. It’ll be more along the lines of text being enlarged so that only three characters at a time can fit on-screen, or the app menus have switched to Serbo-Croat, or the entire display is showing back to front. And before you say “oh she tapped on the wrong button”, ask yourself what kind of fuckwit user interface has a Show Only Three Characters Per Screen button, a Switch To Random Cyrillic Language button or an I Want To Use My Smartphone In The Mirror button?

Honestly, app developers, what on earth are you thinking of? If you insist on coming up with a really stupid feature, such as Hack My Nuts Off With A Rusty Fretsaw, may I humbly suggest that you don’t put it anywhere that the user will find it, let alone emasculate himself by accidentally triggering it?

It’s like a car designer creating a feature that ejects all the wheels for maintenance, and then installing the button directly next to the on-off switch for the radio. Or designing a jet liner cockpit to include a big red button helpfully labelled Do Not Press – that’ll keep the Father Dougals away, won’t it?

Interestingly enough, old-school remote controls tend not to provide idiot-buttons such as this. It’s the kind of thing you only find in smartphone apps, which tells us a lot about the way in which app dev is going at the moment.

The only decent app-based replacement for a physical remote control that I found was the one for the Fire HD Stick: the app is basically a large grey rectangle that you swipe around with one thumb. I hated it at first, assuming it to be the worst kind of disruptive tech design: “Hee hee, let’s reinvent the TV remote control as a featureless grey slab... no, how about a butterfly? ... or a flimsy strip of soiled rag?”

Actually, it’s brilliant. Not only are there no silly things to tap on by mistake – in fact, there is nothing to tap on at all – this kind of simple interface suits the ham-fisted just as well as the dextrous. It also removes the need to keep looking down at the display to see what button to press.

Thus we’ve come full circle. It was a clever thing to rid mobile phones of physical buttons and replace them with a large display to allow software companies to design custom interfaces. But what smartphones could really do with is a way of using them remote-control style, without having to keep looking at the screen.

In other words, they need buttons you can feel.

Phone manufacturers, you can stop reviving small handsets. Instead, start thinking about reviving those haptic response projects you abandoned three years ago. I want my touchscreens to provide something to touch.

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. His remote control handsets are held together with rubber bands and the icons on the buttons have worn away, but he can still navigate them by touch as the buttons have different locations and different shapes. He appreciates you interest in this matter. He is touched.

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