Phone solo

Noted layabout Jason Kot­tke writes about one of the unex­pected virtues of the iPhone; it’s easy to use with one hand.

Peo­ple carry things. Cof­fee, shop­ping bags, books, bags, babies, small dogs, hot dogs, water bot­tles, coats, etc. It’s nice to be able to not put all that crap down just to quickly Google for the clos­est pub­lic restroom (aka Starbucks)…

My wife spends about five hours a day breast­feed­ing our daugh­ter and has only one hand avail­able for non-feeding activ­i­ties. That hand is fre­quently occu­pied by her iPhone; it helps her keep abreast (hey’o!) of cur­rent events, stay con­nected with pals through Twit­ter & email, track feeding/sleeping/diaper chang­ing times, keep notes (she plans meals and gro­cery “shops” at 3am), and alert her layabout hus­band via SMS to come and get the damned baby already.

I think it’s fairly easy to dial and answer any cell phone with one hand. It’s the fact that you can almost per­fectly use smart­phone func­tions with a sin­gle hand that set the iPhone apart. I used to have a Black­berry Bold — it bit the dust around the same time my arm did — and while I really liked a lot of things about the hard­ware, you really couldn’t use it well with one hand. In par­tic­u­lar, the virtues of fast thumb-typing on a mechan­i­cal QWERTY key­board seem a lot smaller when that par­tic­u­lar grip is impos­si­ble for you to pull off. 

Now I’ve got an iPhone, and the abil­ity to use the thing one-handed is one of sev­eral fea­tures that makes it the per­fect phone for me. (Let me also say, after my ven­ture into Black­berry land — if you pri­mar­ily use a Mac, it’s silly to have another smart­phone. If you’re on Win­dows, do what you feel.) 

Jason men­tions my recently bro­ken arm in his post, along with a tweet I wrote: “They should have an ad — ‘If you’ve got a bro­ken arm, this is the per­fect phone for you!’” Jason also points out that many folks have dis­abil­i­ties more per­ma­nent than mine which make it hard for them to use both arms/hands; this obser­va­tion really touches me, since I have a rel­a­tive with a con­gen­i­tal upper limb dif­fer­ence whose left hand is pros­thetic. Also, sev­eral of my good friends from rehab have had spinal injuries that greatly limit the full use of their limbs.

Gen­er­ally, I would say that while I was actu­ally pretty con­scious of acces­si­bil­ity issues before my injury, I have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of it now, as I’m nav­i­gat­ing the world in a wheel­chair, try­ing to both cap­ture and man­age the atten­tion of ran­dom passers-by, totally aware of just how much func­tion I have, and that (unlike my friends) I’ll be hang­ing up the wheel­chair in just a few weeks. (Rehab­bing the arm will take a while longer.) Your cheer­ful­ness about the sit­u­a­tion varies almost directly with your auton­omy — and the iPhone is GREAT at mak­ing you feel autonomous. Inno­va­tion in inter­face design isn’t just about cre­at­ing a cooler expe­ri­ence. It’s about giv­ing more and more peo­ple a shot at that expe­ri­ence to begin with.

One Response

Jindo Fox says:
October 30, 2009 at 8:19 am
The iPhone is great one-handed com­puter, and mine never leaves my pocket because you never know how it could come in handy. Being able to play Scrab­ble while walk­ing the dog is fool­ish, but in other set­tings, it’s good to have some­thing so small, unob­tru­sive, and quiet. The absence of clicky but­tons or other mov­ing parts makes it feel less like tech­nol­ogy and more like an exten­sion of my arm.
When my young child had trou­ble sleep­ing, I’d often have to get up and rock her to sleep. That process some­times took a while, so being able to go through Google Reader with my free hand on a low bright­ness set­ting saved my san­ity. Sim­i­larly, it’s great to have access to Kin­dle books in bed. The white-text-on-black-background is eas­ier on my eyes and doesn’t wake my sleep­ing partner. 
There are only two remain­ing “prob­lems” to solve, but I think they’re tricky: head­phones and bat­tery life.
I wish some­thing could be done about the mess that is head­phones. Wire­less head­sets are pricey and don’t work well. Con­ven­tional ear­buds are a tan­gled pile of junk and get caught on things. They look silly, too. 
Bat­tery life is the one area where the Kin­dle tops the iPhone. The Kin­dle can sol­dier on for days with­out a charge. The iPhone only lasts more than a day if I refrain from actu­ally doing any­thing with it.
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