Palm Pre vs. iPhone (part 1: One-Handed vs. Two Handed)

I would submit to you that the Palm Pre was designed for one-handed convenience. Picured here is a fantasy of what the phone would be like if the phone were sold at Ned's Leftorium.

There is one difference between the Palm Pre and the iPhone that is becoming more and more obvious the more I use the Pre. The Palm Pre was designed to be a one handed phone while the iPhone was designed to be operated with two hands.

Size and Shape

The size and shape of a phone is a big deciding factor for when you fall into the habit of just using one hand with the phone as opposed to two hands. If the phone is wide and flat like a tablet (or like the iPhone) I think the natural thing to do would be to use two hands. The Palm Pre is a bit deeper and a bit more thin (width-wise), fitting perfectly on the left side of my right palm, giving my right thumb a comfortable distance to reach and perform gestures and selections. The iPhone’s thin and wide design might be a good one-hander for a basketball-palming Harlem Globetrotter, but I’ve got more of a half-asian Scooby Doo grip on things.

Notification and Button Placements

Other evidence that the Palm Pre was designed for one-handers is the placement of main notifications at the bottom of the screen. They can be accessed and looked at by tapping once with the thumb, or dismissed by dragging them with your thumb off the screen. If you choose to just ignore the notifications for now, little icons nearest your right thumb (if you’re using the phone right-handed) are easy to touch and trigger a full-view.

The silver ball-bearingesque button in the middle of the gesture area is obviously designed for thumbs as well. Speaking of the gesture area, gestures are performed at thumbs-height, obviously begging you to just use one hand.

Gestures

Gestures are very thumb-centric as well, giving further evidence that the Pre is for one-handed operators. To quit an app, its just a simple up-flick with your thumb, like you were shoving cards one-by-one off the top of a card deck. To delete emails, a simple thumb swipe to the left or right does the trick, same with instant messages (instant messages offer a warning to make sure you want to delete which is a thumbable button). Scroll down a page quickly by flicking with your thumb up or down, or slowly control the page scrolling with a slow movement of your thumb.

Is the Palm Pre For Right Handers?

I would have to say that the answer to this is no, although there were some choices made where a tie-break had to be made, and favoring right handers became natural. This is rare in the phone however, everything is for the most part placed equidistantly in the middle of the phone like the all important silver ball bearing app button, favoring both south paws and righties. Otherwise, most locations of apps can be modified by the user, except the Launcher icon on the dock and the placement of ignored-and-waiting notifications in the bottom right corner.