I just want to be able to hold my devices without my wrists feeling like they’re going to fall off. That can’t be a big ask, can it?
Looking through CES announcements is always a fun time. From functional to bleeding-edge to just plain weird, there’s always something to be excited about. As I browsed the articles, I saw this cute camera-shaped MagSafe power bank from Belkin. I love novelty chargers, so of course a funny little camera power bank would catch my eye. But as I read through the announcement, something stuck out to me—how much the power bank stuck out from the iPhone itself.
Now, I’m under no illusions that a power bank would be so thin that it wouldn’t add any bulk, and I know that the thickest part of the charger holds the retractable USB cable and doubles as a stand. But how can I hold my phone in portrait mode with the power bank attached to it? It’s just so big!
It’s not just this power bank that’s too big, either. The phones themselves are sometimes too unwieldy to handle, especially when my hands are small. When I reviewed the ROG Phone 9, there were more than a few times that I had trouble holding it properly, or just flat-out dropped it. I didn’t hold it against the device or dock any points for it—gaming phones generally want to offer a lot of screen space, which will inevitably make it bigger—but the size was comparable to many normal flagship devices.
Maybe the most egregious example of devices simply being too big is with the latest gaming handhelds. The Acer Nitro Blaze handheld line looks cool, but I can tell there’s no feasible way I could hold this device long-term, especially if the images provided by the company are properly scaled. It’s not just Acer, either—the new Lenovo Legion Go S has a similar problem that you can see in this shot:
The Legion Go offers a touchscreen, but the person holding the handheld wouldn’t be able to hit anything towards the center of the screen without stretching—and I can tell you my hands are smaller than his. At the risk of aging myself, it looks bigger than a Game Gear, and that old handheld was often seen as too big and awkward to hold.
This trend of tech getting bigger and bigger isn’t necessarily bad, as people with bigger hands have dealt with devices being too small and their hands cramping, but there has to be some middle ground between “tiny” and “gargantuan”. You can make devices more comfortable for bigger hands with bulkier cases and grips, but you can’t make a phone or gaming handheld smaller (and expect it to still turn on, at least). Maybe it’s time to look back to making devices smaller again—though not too small, as we still need to see what’s happening on the screens.