My instinct told me what the article is claiming, but there just aren't any other compelling alternatives that will surface the content and serve as a solid navigation on many small screen devices.
We're still in infancy on small and touch screen devices and we don't have a ton of reliable data as things are still changing too fast.
It's something to keep in mind but does anything have any alternatives when you have more than 5 items?
All that tale makes me remember the mouse history of: Two buttons... No, one buttom! No 5 buttons that you can program! Nope, 4 buttons and 2 scroll weels!
We'll settle over something good enough for most cases, but it'll not be the sandwich alone, and I'm quite sure we'll stop using it at desktops on due time. Also, we'll probably need to rethink some APIs for getting a real option.
The way I'm currently doing it is to have two buttons: The Hamburger Icon and a context-sensitive button on the right.
This way my two most important pages get heavy traffic without removing the ability to access the other pages which get used less often.
Hamburger icons are great for large numbers of pages no one uses particularly often, but are necessary for the app to work (Settings, Profile, etc.) and as a fail safe to always be able to navigate to where you want. The way to access you main pages should be baked into them (links, buttons, action bars) on the page itself.
We're still in infancy on small and touch screen devices and we don't have a ton of reliable data as things are still changing too fast.
It's something to keep in mind but does anything have any alternatives when you have more than 5 items?