Playing a puzzle game at a desk rather than on a couch changes the ergonomics completely. Your hands are supported, which is good, and your head is now looking down at a small bright rectangle at close range, which is less good. Four adjustments cover almost all of it.
Angle before height
A phone flat on a desk means a neck bent forward for the whole session. Propped at roughly 45 degrees and pushed back to about arm's length, the same screen sits far closer to a neutral head position. If the stand only offers steep or flat, steep is the better mistake.
Height matters less than people expect for a phone, because you are not reading small text for hours — you are looking at a board of large coloured shapes. The angle is what saves your neck.
The lamp goes beside you, never behind the phone
A lamp behind the screen puts a bright source directly in your field of view and forces the phone's brightness up to compete. A lamp to one side, slightly behind your shoulder, lifts the room's overall level so the screen can stay dim. That difference between screen and room is the thing that determines comfort, not the screen alone.
Avoid pointing anything directly at the phone: glossy glass reflects it straight back, and no amount of brightness fixes a reflection.
Stop the stand from sliding
Tapping a phone in a stand pushes it away from you, a millimetre at a time, until forty minutes later it is at the back of the desk at the wrong angle. A mat with a rubber underside fixes this completely and is the entire reason our desk mat exists. Any mat will do — a mouse pad works — but a long one also gives you somewhere to rest your wrists.
Cable management for one cable
Phone games drain a battery quickly, and a charging cable dangling off the desk pulls the phone with it. Route it under the mat and up through the gap behind the stand, so the weight of the cable hangs below the desk edge rather than off the phone's port. This also stops the connector wearing at an angle, which is the usual reason a charging port stops holding a plug.
The small things that add up
- Silence notifications while playing. A phone in a stand is at eye level, which makes every banner far more distracting than it is in your hand.
- Keep a cloth on the desk. Screens propped up collect dust rather than fingerprints, and dust scatters lamp light.
- Sit back. The natural instinct at a desk is to lean in towards a small screen; the whole point of the stand is that you do not have to.
- Take a break every half hour, look at something across the room for twenty seconds. This applies to any screen and is more useful than any accessory.
Our mat is 700 × 300 mm, $27.50 AUD, posted from Adelaide and quoted by email before anything is paid. Nothing on this page is medical advice; persistent neck or eye pain is a matter for a professional.