We've gotten to the point of peak absurdity where 5.9" is considered "ultra-compact".
I'm in the market for a new phone right now, and it's baffling how ridiculously big most phones are right now. I only use mine for instant messaging and browsing Hacker News. 5" is more than enough for that.
While phones have gotten bigger, screen size is not a good indication of that. It’s more useful to compare physical dimensions because of slightly different aspect ratios and border widths/roundness
This, really. While screen sizes have been getting bigger, the aspect ratio has been getting taller and the bezels/body of the phones has been getting smaller. While I agree that regardless of all of this modern phones are too big, you can't just look at the screen size.
What I find more interesting is that their website focus so much on it being compact, but it's actually just pretty much the same size as the regular iphone.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. Notice how all the models on the page have big to giant hands?
One of my earliest smartphones was 4.2". That was already problematic for my hand. 5" is too large, 5.9" is out of question. I don't want a tablet for a phone. I want a phone that I can use with just one hand and still reach all corners of the screen comfortably with my thumb from a firm grip (i.e. not from the side, but with the bottom right corner firmly tucked in the palm of my hand, if that makes sense). And my hands are not even small.
The phone, or the screen? The Nexus 5S was the last phone I owned that I could comfortable hold and had a 4.9" screen (diagonal), but with a 70.8% screen-to-body ratio (5.43 inches tall). This Zenfone 9 has a 5.9 inches screen (diagonal) but is less than 1cm taller, and exactly as wide as the Nexus 5S.
Phone manufacturers have tried selling small phones. Sony couldn't make a business of it. Even Apple reportedly can't make it go round.
Face it, you're a tiny minority. My wife made fun of my iPhone Pro Max, until she inherited my old one and now she can't go back, it's huge but the screen real estate is really nice to have.
They want a small premium smartphone, and those have been standard features for premium smartphones for a couple of years now. You evidently want to stray further from the premium category, not that there is anything wrong with it -- you make fair arguments.
Yeah, I own a Galaxy S20. Damn thing always prints on my pants when is in the pocket. The bigger screen size is good, but I preffer portability. If I want a giant screen I would by a tablet.
The fit in my pants is honestly the biggest problem I've had too since getting a Pixel 6. The one-handed keyboard/screen mode works fine, the battery life is nice, and the bigger screen I mostly don't care either way about. It's big in my pants though, when I'm not using it, I think only folding phones will really solve this.
Pixel 6a user wanting to know what to do with my phone to actually carry it. Missus hasn't used a handbag in almost a decade, and is now using one just to carry her phone. Impractical.
Apple switched to a larger screen size not because they thought it was better but their phones were losing out in showrooms to the larger Galaxy phones.
Well, when you can't go thinner and lighter without ruining structural integrity and battery life, you go bigger with the screen. Gotta keep people on the upgrade treadmill so they can visually see who is up-to-date, just like the notch.
Except that could easily be achieved by making the phone slightly thicker, instead. When phones are so thin and fragile that a rigid case is practically mandatory, I don't know why "thin" is a selling point.
We could solve two problems at once: get rid of a camera bump and make the battery bigger at the same time by using the extra space of the camera bump to house a bigger battery.
Not sure why it hasn't happened yet or if it has I don't know if it.
My guess is the same reason glossy screens won out over matte screens for laptops: because they look slightly better on the showroom floor, despite the worse real-world performance.
Why does the battery size matter? Do we compare car fuel tank sizes? We typically care about how it affects our use of the product. How long can the iPhone SE last on a charge? How does it compare to other iPhones?
Yes. I can't tell you why they thought it was important, but in my childhood I've heard multiple adults talk about "My car goes <x> miles before a fill-up". Never made sense to me, gas stations are everywhere and filling up is quick.
> Never made sense to me, gas stations are everywhere and filling up is quick.
Gas stations are not everywhere, and can be few and far between on certain routes, and more to the point filling up being quick may be the normal conditions, but if you are old enough (or have lived in the right–or maybe wrong would be more accurate–places even without being that old), you have experience of times when filling up has not been quick, or even, on any given day for any given car, necessarily permitted.
I think it's because more and more people are opting to use phones to consume their media instead of traditional avenues like TV.
Lying in bed, on the bus, in the classroom, etc - less time to sit down in the living room and watch youtube/movies on the TV - especially with the TikTok(/vine?) generation latching onto vertical video formats too.
I think it's just a generational thing - I remember being amazed at how people are consuming vertical video now like it's anything else when 5-10 years ago people would give the cameraman grief for filming this "crazy moment!" in vertical format :P
My last two phones are a Moto Z Play (5.5in) and a Pixel 4a (5.8in). While the Pixel 4a screen was larger, I found the larger Moto Z phone immensely more comfortable to use. The chins meant you could more comfortably reach the inside corners, and the different aspect ratio meant the phone could be used in landscape mode without the keyboard occluding the entire screen. The Pixel 4a, despite its ostensibly larger screen, actually felt like a step down because the keyboard usability is heavily dependent on how square the screen is.
Imho the move to higher than 16:9 aspect ratios has really made it harder to talk about screen size.
It's absurd. I need to buy a new phone (as in, my 6-year old 5" phone is really falling apart and I can't find parts to replace) and my only option is pretty much a used Pixel 2, 3, or 4a.
I don't run spyware OS anyway, Lineage+microg is the bare minimum. I've found unofficial maintainers give better support for their custom roms than manufacturers.
>. I've found unofficial maintainers give better support for their custom roms than manufacturers.
This is so true. Typing this on a Mi A2 Lite released in 2018 rocking a custom A11 ungoogled ROM and squeezing almost 3 days of battery life out of it. It's screen size is 5.84" and it's perfect. I refuse to go any bigger.
Just got a Pixel 6a, which one reviewer called "amazingly small". Uh, yeah, anything but. Got my iPhone 4S out of a drawer to compare. I can only laugh. Admittedly, it is much smaller than the phone I moved from. Not very pocket-friendly though, and the camera ledge gets stuck on the outside of your pocket too frequently.
I have slightly big hand and I don't mind the current sizes, I like them. But I wish all phones were thicker, they just so thin and slick. I alwasy have to add a case to make them ticker and easier to use
Solution in search of an implementation: removable backs allowing for fast battery swaps, and adding a more substantial back that becomes a part of the phone rather than a cheap afterthought. Yes, I'm oldskool.
Height does make phones less comfortable to handle with a single hand, which is what I prefer to do most of the time. They are heavier, lean further back so you have to spread your fingers on the back more, and reaching the top to pull the notifs bar, for example, is harder.
I'd argue height is worse than width in comfort.
I'm in the market for a new phone right now, and it's baffling how ridiculously big most phones are right now. I only use mine for instant messaging and browsing Hacker News. 5" is more than enough for that.