I don't understand why you cannot get +2.50 reading glasses and use your screen even closer to the eyes, I'm using +2.0.

The point haertig has expressed is that if you are nearsighted already - you need no reading glasses at all to have a huge crisp screen on a physically small device.

Or, we can have different solutions to the same problem. The phone I carry is an iPhone so we are starting with different solutions. There are advantages in some Android apps though, but I'm not going to get a 5.5" display when I can have 8".

The PDA model does not matter for the screen's virtual size. As far as I understand (let's say, assuming you are reading the forum on it), you don't want to use reading glasses, so you have to hold a PDA at the arm's length to focus on the screen better, but not perfectly, thus needing to increase the page zoom in order to have a larger recognizable font size, what is clipping the content of the page, thus asking for a physically larger screen to reduce the effect?...

I would rather carry the glasses than suffer like that. They are less than a buck off eBay (I bought 3 pairs once, +1.5, +2, +2.5 in a large Pilot style framing). Great for tinkering with micro electronics and for reading the phone in the bed.

Another cheap but precious smartphone gadget slimming down my EDC kit:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/391333526724 It makes possible to connect any regular USB memory stick or some USB devices (like mouse or keyboard) to your Android Smartphone and has a minimal physically possible size. It's so thin, that I'm carrying it in the camera lens' hole of my phone belt clip between two pieces of tape. The regularly sized OTG piece is going off my keychain forever!

Nice.

For those with an iPhone/iPad a good looking article and collection of smartphone apps: http://prepared-housewives.com/emergency-apps-that-might-just-save-your-life/

By the way, I've got another little EDC wonder of eBay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/121876066748


In short, it's a blue tooth (BT) tag, connecting to your android phone. The software iTracing is really immature, but I'm using it with the community made version (iTracing2 instead to integrate with the Tasker app, which I'm using for every phone automation ideas. It allows:

1. Use the tag as a wireless button (camera shutter, register your GPS fix, launch an app, turn on a siren, etc). It supports single and double click events, as well as the long click, which turns the tag on and off.

2. Use the tag as a remote noise maker (search for your keys in the room by pressing a button on the phone, so the tag attached to your keys starts beeping loud; it's also blinking with a small blue led).

3. Detect if the tag is out of range or how far it is from your phone. Basically it just monitors the BT signal strength and you can set an event on a certain % of that signal, to replicate a sort of "geo fence" feature, like "turn on the alarm if the tag, attached to your bag is out of range", so you don't forget it in the bus or on a bench. In conjunction with the GPS on your phone, the smart enough app will associate the last location the tag was visible with the BT radio low signal, so you can see that last location on the map if you've missed the alarm by accident (or had to keep the volume down for a reason).

Nice toy to play with for under $2 shipped. Some smart aces are selling the same for $20 and deleting my sarcastic comments on their web pages I can easily see it rigged for the wire perimeter alarm triggering in the camp as its range is around 75'.