Iphone SE super small

Have you ever had to strain your thumb muscle to reach the letters on the far side of an iPhone 6 series keyboard? Or had to wedge one of those phones into a tiny, tight pocket in your body-hugging jeans?

Yes? Then you're going to love the dimensions of the old-is-new-again iPhone SE. Especially, if you're Chinese, a woman, an older child, younger teen or Donald Trump.

Apple has felt your pain and, after years of talking up the benefits of embiggened iPhones, the company has now decided to roll back the years and go retro with a 4-inch version of its flagship product.

Ostensibly, the iPhone SE is Frankenstein phone: the brains of a six-month-old iPhone 6s squeezed into the body of a 2½-year-old iPhone 5s.

Although you can still opt for a 4.7-inch iPhone 6, 6s or the humungous 5.5-inch phablet versions, Apple believes there's enough demand for the smaller size to warrant extending its lifespan for another few years.

Speaking at the unveiling of the new model in California on Monday, Apple vice-president Greg Joswiak said 30 million 4-inch screen iPhones were sold in 2015.

"Some people really love smaller phones," he said. "In some countries like China, for a majority of these customers it is their first iPhone."

The Atlantic proffered the reasoning: "The average Chinese man, for instance, is three inches shorter than the average white American man." Meaning hand and thumb reach will be commensurately smaller.

And as the Middle Kingdom is now Apple's biggest market for iPhones, what China wants, China gets.

But the Chinese are not Apple's only target market for the small of hand.

Many small-handed women have also been voicing their dismay over the trend towards 

bloated screen sizes.

"Increasingly, on the latest versions of the kinds of phones I want to use, I cannot type one-handed," wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina.

"I cannot take a picture one-handed. I can barely scroll one-handed - not very well, though. I can't unlock my phone one-handed. I can't even turn on my phone one-handed as my fingers cannot securely wrap around the phone while I push a button with a finger."

She was complaining that, as a 5' 2" (152-centimetre) tall female with equally petite hands, it was impossible for her to wield her smartphone one-handed and capture decent photos of a tear-gassing in Istanbul.

The sentiments were echoed by Gizmodo journalist Alex Cranz in her rant My Tiny Baby Hands Need the iPhone SE. "Thanks for pulling us out of the baby-fingered phone ghetto Apple," Cranz wrote. "We deserve phones just as powerful as the rest of you, but in a size befitting our minuscule digits ... "

And then there are the kids, many of whom now inherit their parents' old iPhones before they hit double digits. Four-inch screens are perfectly suited for growing hands.

And finally, not forgetting the other big beneficiary of this downsizing.

The (potential) next president of the United States of America and leader of the free world, Donald J Trump.

Trump has been dogged by "small hands" accusations since the late 1980s when Spy magazine coined the epithet: "short-fingered vulgarian".

The tease reared up again in February during a campaign rally when fellow Republican 

Marco Rubio said Trump's hand size meant that he couldn't be trusted.

"I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-foot-2," Rubio said of Trump.

Trump later responded during a televised debate, showing his hands and saying: "Look at those hands. Are those small hands?"

And in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday, Trump once again rose to the defence of his body parts.

"My hands are normal hands," he said. "I was on line shaking hands with supporters and one of the supporters said, 'Mr. Trump, you have strong hands, you have good size hands.' And then another one would say, 'Oh, you have great hands, Mr Trump. I had no idea.'