The Big Disadvantage of Small Phones Like the iPhone Mini
By: Angela Lashbrook
Tags: Consumer Technology, iPhone, Smartphones, Digital Life, Technology

The Big Disadvantage of Small Phones Like the iPhone Mini

Image: Apple

The iPhone 12 Mini, launching this week for $729 and up, is Apple’s smallest phone in years. The company hasn’t released a phone as small as the 5.18-inch iPhone Mini since 2013, when it debuted the iPhone 5 line, which ranged in size from 4.87 to 4.9 inches.

It’s cute, and as Corey Jones, chair of the Industrial Design Department at California College of the Arts, says, “The 12 Mini is probably the purest expression of the iPhone in recent memory.”

But I really don’t recommend it if you, like me, are a heavy phone user. Research indicates that the smaller the screen, the harder it is to read and process the information presented on it. That isn’t to say it’s a bad option for every single person, but for most smartphone users, I’d caution against choosing the Mini over other, bigger options. Screen size is critical to how easily people absorb and understand information, and when we’re getting more of it than ever via our smartphones — and when so much of it is actually misinformation — it is maybe not the best idea to put obstacles in the way of our reading comprehension.

Content on a bigger screen demands less cognitive effort than the same information on a smaller screen.

Years of research show just how significantly screen size affects consumers. “A large corpus of work in the fields of psychology and communication has consistently found that an increase in screen size positively influences various cognitive and affective domains of user perceptions,” wrote the authors of a 2014 study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. The study looked at how 130 participants fared on tasks using 5.3- and 3.7-inch smartphone screens. Participants had a much easier time completing a given task on the larger screens; they also found larger screens more aesthetically pleasing and pleasurable to use.

In a 2019 study, researchers from University of Michigan and Texas A&M University investigated how well participants comprehended video news stories on different screen sizes. They found that the smaller the screen, the lower the attentiveness and engagement with the content. Viewers would come away with a lesser understanding of the material if they viewed it on a small smartphone rather than a tablet or laptop. Larger screens, according to the researchers, facilitate a greater feeling of immersion, which allows viewers to digest content more easily. In other words, content on a bigger screen demands less cognitive effort than the same information on a smaller screen.

There’s another factor affecting your ability to readily grasp information on your screen: scrolling. Reading and literacy researchers argue that the act of scrolling compromises our ability to absorb text, and the smaller the screen, the more you have to scroll to finish it. People are already less willing to read long texts on a screen than a physical document of the same length; while I appreciate my Kindle, I much prefer to read paper books (though storage in my apartment is rapidly becoming an issue), and some aspects of reading comprehension, such as temporality (knowing when something occurred in a story), are more difficult when you’re reading from a screen instead of a paper book.

Physical books are a little better than e-books when it comes to reading comprehension, but there’s not much of a contest when comparing e-books to smartphones. The smaller screen on the smartphone, the scrolling versus tapping/turning mechanism for turning the book’s pages, and the countless distractions posed by having the world at your fingertips make trying to read anything much longer than a blog post pretty damn hard on a tiny smartphone screen.

But a larger iPhone screen mitigates some of these issues. When your eyes can see more text at once, you’re able to put words in greater context, allowing for better reading comprehension. You’re also, of course, scrolling less. Anyone who’s doing a lot of reading on their smartphone should seriously consider getting a bigger smartphone for this reason alone.

Reading and literacy researchers argue that the act of scrolling compromises your ability to absorb text, and the smaller the screen, the more you have to scroll to finish it.

There’s an elephant in the room, however, and that’s portability. A 2013 study found that while participants performed significantly better on information-seeking tasks using larger smartphone screens, this effect was somewhat tempered if the user found the screen ungainly and difficult to hold. For best results, the screen needs to be as big as is comfortable for you to use with one hand.

This means my iPhone XR, which is 5.94 inches long and has a 6.1-inch screen, is likely the ideal screen size for my small hands. (Seriously: I wear childrens’ gloves.) I can navigate my phone pretty well with one hand, and my extensive use—including way too much emailing, photography (mostly of my dog), social media, online window shopping, Google Maps, and the occasional Kindle app reading—means I need the phone to be as big as possible. I’m not sure I could use a larger iPhone as well as I use my current one, but I certainly don’t want to size down.

Jones, the industrial design professor, says the introduction of the iPhone Mini indicates that Apple continues to move away from the one-size-fits-all mentality it’s been associated with. Still, he says, the iPhone Mini is likely best for casual, mostly recreational use, such as riding public transportation and keeping one hand free. “These folks probably sit down to another device to get real work done,” he says, though he notes that young people and people with small hands would clearly benefit from the small phone option.

“Being limited to the lesser device was a real frustration for many users in previous generations of the iPhone. Many people who optioned up for better specs have probably been conditioned to using the larger sizes, and it might be hard to go back to a smaller-size screen, but a few will welcome the option, I am sure,” he says.

I’ve criticized Apple plenty of times for its fixation on keeping options limited, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the company is introducing a smaller phone. Kids and other people with small hands, casual users, or people who use their phones in active contexts — I imagine a restaurant manager, for example, navigating a busy environment with a small iPhone tucked into their pants pocket — will clearly benefit from the smaller device. But anyone who does a lot of work and reading on their phone may as well give in to what their brain really wants (or needs) and stick with a bigger phone. If you really want a cute little tether that will let you further disconnect while making you look Luddite-cool, might I suggest a Baby Phone instead?