The recent announcement of the HTC Titan and Samsung Galaxy Note prompted me to once again re-think modern smartphones, tablets and screen sizes. Particularly I was wondering when does a screen (and the device itself) become too bulky to carry around.
I remember when the original HTC HD2 was announced I thought no one would want such a big phone in their pockets. Obviously I was wrong and over time I learned to appreciate the benefits of large screens. However, in the meantime my thinking was that 4-inch displays are in the sweet spot, but they are not. Today I find a 4.3-inch screen as mandatory feature of any phone I’ll be buying. If a handset maker manages to cram a 4.5-inch or so display in the same shell (i.e. without making the phone bigger), I would be willing to buy that too (think Samsung Galaxy S II LTE).
All said I don’t really get the idea of phones with 5-inch screens. Are they tablets or phones? I don’t have such large pockets to carry them around. Maybe our female readers dig the idea since they usually carry their gadgets in a bag, but what about the rest of us? Should we start buying pants with bigger pockets? Also with a phone that has a 5-inch screen I’m not sure I’ll need a tablet anymore. This is especially true if we’re talking about the Samsung Galaxy Note, which has that gorgeous Super AMOLED HD screen that makes colors super vivid and the pixel density makes your brand new HD TV look like a 5-year old technology.
What do you think about this? What’s your perfect screen size for a phone?