Next week Apple is expected to unveil iPhones with the largest screens in that product's history. In finally going big, Apple is months behind where the market has already gone. But it's a smart move made necessary by you.
A friend observed that if you plotted mobile phone sizes on a graph, the graph's line would look like a roller coaster as phone sizes went up and down. The first cellphones were massive bricks. As technology improved and consumer tastes became more discerning, they evolved into small beetle-like clamshell devices. Then they got thin, picked up touch screens and lost physical keyboards. But they were still small. One day, someone picked up one of these dainty devices, squinted at the screen, tried to type on the tiny virtual keyboard and said, "I can't read this." Thus the big smartphone was reborn.
That's my simplistic interpretation of history but it's serviceable. After years of companies like Samsung making a business out of providing a product for almost every conceivable screen size, consumers and manufacturers have settled into a few key sweet spots for the devices in their lives. Those sizes are based not only on the function of the device but the biological limits of the user. For a good chunk of the market in North America, our eyes are getting old and our patience for carrying around multiple devices has worn thin.
Bigger is what we need.
For tablets, the sweet spots are eight inches and 10 inches. The eight-inch models are best for media consumption, including web surfing, books and video. Examples of best in class are the iPad mini and the Samsung Tab S 8.4. (The Google Nexus 7, my longtime favourite, is alas a seven-inch shrimp.) The 10-inch models are best for media consumption and casual gaming on steroids (the iPad Air) or productivity, where Windows 8 tablets have an edge.
For laptops, the sweet spot for most people is 13 inches, especially for something thin and light like the MacBook Air or various Windows 8 models. The 15-inch laptops are reserved for either home-based use or serious road warriors, while the expensive 17-inch models are reserved for professional video editors and committed gamers.
For phones, the story has changed. When the iPhone was taking out the competition and changing the industry, the sweet spot was 3.5 inches, which is the size of my trusty workplace iPhone 4s. It immediately became too small the day two years ago I got my HTC8X with its fourinch screen. Since then, as five-inch models from the appropriately named Nexus 5 to Samsung's popular Galaxy S5 have hit the market, my HTC has begun to feel small. Next to the five-inchers, my iPhone disappears.
Five inches is now considered the sweet spot for smartphones: it offers acres of screen real estate but remains pocketable. The size has proven popular, and it's no accident one of the new iPhones said to be coming next week is just shy of the five-inch goal as Apple looks to regain market share lost to Android.
But the other iPhone expected next week is 5.5 inches, which is a jarring departure from Apple orthodoxy. What gives?
Samsung, LG and Nokia have all produced behemoths from 5.5 to seven inches. The tech press is generally confused by them, but not so a fair number of users. If you read the online user forums for these devices, you'll discover that consumers who've bought big phones are passionate about them. For the first few days they wondered why they were carrying around a small dinner plate. Then they wondered how they coped without that big screen.
For Apple fans, who may have been secretly jealous of friends toting around Samsung Galaxy Notes, think of a somewhat smaller iPad mini that can make calls. It will do all the cool things we expect from tablets, but in a size that's forgiving on strained eyes. In aging North America, that's more and more of us.
Will it be too big? That's an individual choice. The promise is that one device, a small tablet that's a phone, can replace carrying around a separate phone and tablet.
Android users have discovered big. So have Window Phones users. It's time Apple grew up.
Barry Link is editor of the Vancouver Courier newspaper and a geek enthusiast. Email him at [email protected].
