Reachability<\/a> and the narrow keyboard.<\/p>\nFirstly, I now know that Reachability is an accessibility option, and that while it is on by default, I had disabled it years ago. (Back when it was activated by triple-clicking the home button I think!). I learned that once I turned it back on I could activate it by swiping down on the bottom of the screen \u2014 the inverse of the gesture to get to the Home Screen.<\/p>\n
I also mostly use my phone single-handedly in my left hand (umbrella in my stronger right), so I\u2019ve discovered I can switch to the narrow keyboard one-handed by pressing and holding on the globe button on the keyboard with my left thumb and then swiping to the appropriate keyboard shape and letting go.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m also disappointed that the bigger screen doesn\u2019t give me room for more icons\/widgets on the Home Screen. And much to my surprise, the bigger screen sometimes makes it HARDER to read text \u2014 when the font is small, the lines are longer, and it\u2019s easier to be out by one when you move from line to line (Ars Technica\u2019s site is the worst!).<\/p>\n
Having said all that, the big screen is glorious for consuming media, and it makes photo editing much easier in the built-in camera app.<\/p>\n
The change to titanium couldn\u2019t have come at a better time, because the titanium big phone feels no heavier than my old stainless steel small phone. If anything, it feels a shade lighter!<\/p>\n
The other side of the trade-off has worked well for me thank goodness \u2014 the 5x telephoto is impressive. I was afraid the jump between the main lens and the 5x might be too big, that it might leave me wanting, but it hasn\u2019t. Turns out that when you want to zoom right in, you really do want to zoom right in!<\/p>\n
I still shoot mostly wide angle, followed by 1x, and still only use the telephoto 5 or 10% of the time. But, when you need to zoom you really need to zoom, and having a good zoom is the difference between getting any usable shot, or nothing at all. The 5x gets more than the 3x ever could.<\/p>\n
What really impresses me is that the quality of the 5x is at least as good as I got from the 3x, and I actually think it\u2019s even a little better. I feel like I get less noise, and even when pixel peeping, less weirdness on edges from over-sharpening.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m also pleasantly surprised by the difference in battery life. Each time I check if I need to pop the phone on one of my charge pads it turns out to still have way more charge than I expected!<\/p>\n
My Dad is also thinking of upgrading his iPhone, and he was wondering what I bought. I explained I\u2019d reluctantly gone big for the better camera and that I really would have preferred to avoid having such a big phone. He didn\u2019t care about the camera, and didn\u2019t think the size would bother him one bit since he always uses two hands. All he wanted to know was if the battery life was longer!<\/p>\n
That was all over Signal, and he figured he\u2019d hold off ordering till after the next time I came to visit so he could hold the phone, to be sure to be sure he was fine with the size. I was home on Wednesday \u2014 he picked it up, bounced his hand up and down to check the weight popped it in his shirt pocket, and said the size was just fine! His only other comment was that the material felt nice, and the screen looked good. From his point of view, no tradeoff at all!<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sorry I chose the bigger phone, but if Apple lets me have the good camera in the smaller form factor next year, I\u2019m going back. If not, I\u2019ll probably skip the next cycle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bart joins me this week on the show to discuss the tradeoffs he made in buying an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Here are some of the thoughts he’ll share. After decades of resisting big phones, and being \u2018that guy\u2019 who was cranky when the iPhone X made the smallest modern phone notably bigger, it\u2019s finally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[6125,6124],"class_list":["post-29846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-iphone-15-pro-max","tag-phablet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29847,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29846\/revisions\/29847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}