[idanb]

I recently bought a Samsung Edge for Samsung Gear development, and went abroad for a few weeks so ended up using it with the SIM card for that country while still keeping my phone alive.

Apart from the benefits of the edge "design" not being too relevant for me, the biggest issue I had was accidentally hitting notifications when I pulled the phone out of my pocket. At one point I somehow accidentally deleted an app, or something that resulted in the app being removed from the phone entirely. Granted I was travelling, doing a lot of hiking and so perhaps it was more aggressive handling than normal - but in general I found that not having an edge on the phone really hindered my ability to use it, and forced me to be extra careful in handling of the phone in regular use as well as when I pulled it out of my pocket or back in.

I've been seeing a lot of these "edge less" screens and a lot of other features that people don't really care about, with a move away from what customers actually want. Like removing the headphone port in the iPhone 7 or going in this direction with edge to edge screens and making the phone thinner and thinner but faster and faster (meaning less battery life, and spottier performance since the CPU needs to be throttled).

Smart phones have been a commodity for a bit now - and the important things are the incremental improvements in battery life, performance, screen resolutions and graphics, networking efficiency and most importantly the services that power the phone which is effectively a way to access the internet.

[matt_wulfeck]

I had a similar issue with places Android phones typically place a standalone "back" button, the bottom right of a phone. When reaching across the phone with my thumb I would constantly bump this back button. The experience was so frustrating on a Galaxy S3 that I change to an iPhone.

I wondered if they have done enough user experience researching how people use the phone. I can't believe I'm the only person who ran into this issue. It's something I've come to admire with Apple products. They're very polished and I rarely run into experiences like what I had bumping the back button on my old S3.

[idanb]

That drove me crazy too - cap-sense buttons have been largely a customer experience fail, so not sure why it's gone on this long. I'm a big fan of the tactile "bump" feedback, and it's way too easy to do something by accident for even the most careful user.

It's funny how Apple did the "no buttons thing" because they were responding to a tech ecosystem that had a button for everything at the cost of the user getting overwhelmed. However, now there's no sanity in the other direction - with people avoiding buttons and making things so streamlined that they're harder to use.

In every age there's an innovate response to a cliche, but ultimately this becomes a cliche in of itself :)

[Mithaldu]

Same, even with a small and narrow android phone i have to consciously make a spider-like gesture to reach anything on the left side of the screen and sometimes trigger finds just by holding it by the edges because the screen is so close to the edges.

A phone with even less space around the screen would just drive me entirely mad.

And to think, just a few years ago with the E6-00 i had a phone that i could operate mostly blind. Nowadays i can't even take my phone out of the pocket without being careful and conscious about it.