From Mini To Max Phone

If you really want to go minimal and minimize your smartphone, then something like the iPhone 12 mini is literally a great fit. That’s what I did last Summer. I wanted my phone to be hand-holdable and pocketable. It being easily affordable was icing on the cake. So why would I think an upgrade would be to upsize, getting a Plus or Max iPhone?

Battery Life

I’m here to tell you, although I carry a 10,000 mAh battery pack in my EDC bag, having to frequently charge my mini iPhone during the day is not nice. When new, it’s rated with 15 hours of power. That might sound okay, but I bought my iPhone refurbished and its power time is around 12 hours. In practice, it loses 10% of its charge by the end of breakfast. Not great.

In contrast, a new iPhone 14 Plus gets 26 hours of battery life and the 14 Pro Max gets an eye-popping 29. So a refurbished one will likely last about twice as long as my current iPhone. That means when my 12 mini is totally dead at 0%, a 14 Pro Max would still have 50% left in the tank. It’d be like having a fully recharged 12 mini.

Tap Targets

Since I blog, you might call me a writer. I enjoy typing and do it all the time. But typing on the iPhone 12 mini virtual keyboard can sometimes make me feel like chucking my phone across the room. Has anyone ever rage-quit texting? The frequent typos are very frustrating. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I want the letter “I” but get “O” instead, and vice versa; it’s a constant battle.

The solution is to type slower and more carefully. The problem there is that my brain is accustomed to quickly free-flowing my thoughts through my fingers on my MacBook. Naturally, I want to also type as fast as I think when using my iPhone, but that’s just not possible, at least not on the tiny iPhone 12 mini keyboard. I think and hope the tap targets on a Plus or Max keyboard will be big enough to greatly reduce my typo frequency.

Novelty

Besides the two main solutions to problems, sometimes you just want something different, a change of pace, a fresh start. Having used a mini iPhone, I now want to use a mega iPhone, going from itty-bitty to ginormous.

It will really feel like a really big upgrade (literally, no pun intended this time). I used to own the iPhone 8 Plus — it’s like the size of a license plate on a car. That thing was massive. They call it a phablet. I call it an iPad nano with cellular.

Widescreen iPod

With a giant leap in phone size, not only do you get a huge battery and a display with hopefully bigger tap targets, you also get an ultra-wide iPod.

• I’m talking about a video display big enough to immerse into movies and games on the go.
• I’m talking about editing details in photos on the go.
• I’m talking about seeing more of the web with text large enough to reduce strain on my 46 year-old eyeballs.
• I’m talking about turn-by-turn GPS navigation that lets me see everything on the map from the dashboard.

Yes, I would be trading off the comfortable hand-held size of my mini iPhone, but I know I’ll manage just fine. As for being pocketable, that’s a tougher thing to lose, but my phone is almost always carried inside my EDC bag anyways, so that point is kind of moot.

Summary

Now that I’m thinking about it, it makes sense why folding and flipping phones are a thing. People want ultra-mobility. But they also want ultra-sized screens. To get both, that screen must fold down somehow. So maybe one day, Apple will make its own folding iPad or flipping iPhone — iFlip, iFold?

For now, though, Apple offers three sizes in a small, medium, and large spectrum. I have a mini. I could meet in the middle and get a “regular” size iPhone. But I want to go all the way to the Max. The biggest battery, the biggest display, the biggest upgrade.