Do you cave and use both hands? Do you take the chance and try to use them one-handed when more actively using them? Or do you ultimately submit and get an accessory to kinda help, at least with keeping a hold of them?
Edit:
l o n g f i n g o r
b i g h a n d
a few other answers:
just use both hands, get an accessory, and/or balance on pinky and develop the toughest pinky imaginable
bonus:
find some smol phone you like and savor it for as long as it works
No, but the options are defeatist because they reflect my feelings related to the broad design trends of phones being bigger, and my preference for handling a phone one-handed. For me personally, it’s caving in (and frankly just clumsy feeling) to have to use both hands to handle phones (in portrait orientation) that are in a weird size range that’s almost too big but not so much so that they’re no longer portable.
Also in my opinion while it’s absolutely not a personal failure to use an accessory to help handle larger phones, it simply is a design failure. It’s like having to put a label on a door to tell people how to open it, that’s courtesy of a design failure that made opening the door ambiguous.
Anyway, 6.5" is a large phone to me, so that being a “standard” is why the phrasing is so defeatist. You’re stuck in an awkward compromise if you want a device capable and comfortable: get some less powerful but smaller option (e.g. Jelly), or something that even on the smaller end is still relatively large (e.g. Zenfone 8/9).
Get a Z flip. Foldables are the current answer of the industry to your pledge.
EDIT: Just noticed the door sign comment. LOL, we are legally required to put a sign to tell people how to open doors in every single public door. Yet people get it wrong all the time. That’s 100% not a design problem, there’s very little to change in door design that affect usability like that. Like, literally has handle/knob or doesn’t have handle.
For me, the samsung flagships have been a godsend - small enough to use one-handed, yet powerful.
People hate on Samsung but the UI has improved over the past few years, and whatever bloat they have can mostly be uninstalled now.
As a bonus, I like the Samsung quick toggles much, much more than the pixel ones.