I feel like it's a cultural thing. "Designed by Apple in California" where you just drive to work so a bigger phone is only a benefit (larger battery, easier-to-read text when you're using the phone). But in NYC, small is a huge benefit, and it's a shame that the transit-deprived West Coast tech companies don't understand our use case here.
Ahh, you nailed it and I've bitten my metaphorical tongue to avoid saying loudly: the damned mobile phone ecosystem is designed and tested by people in giant suburban, car environments like California. Not subway takers. Not pedestrians. The giant two-handed phone design obviously is torture on a subway. With navigation buttons even Andre the Giant would have had trouble reaching.
You know what else, though, shows the bias? Apps that think they're always connected to data. Even Spotify, with its glorious offline ability to play music, hangs stupidly in its main home screens (the one that has the we-made-this-for-you playlists). Other video playing apps with no real caching or notification or awareness to the user when there's no data.
There are many examples of blind spinning waiting type hanging behavior, as if no one can fathom using a phone during a commute that isn't in a car (or a red yellow and green type of bus?)
Sorry but this does not sound very convincing. If the car culture in California is causing Apple to produce large phones, why didn’t Apple start doing it earlier? It’s not like the sprawling suburbia of California only came into existence in the last few years.
Samsung, on the other hand, has been producing huge phones that no one is going to be able to use with a single hand since a long time ago, and has no problem selling them in places like Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem to me that it is suburban culture that is inflating the size of phones.
(Don’t get me wrong. I like dense urban environments, public transport, ability to use apps without internet connection, and, at the same time, smaller phones.)
2) A battery life hack. (Number of pixels to illuminate goes up like the square, volume of the battery in the phone goes up like the cube... so larger phones will have better battery life. This was a huge, huge, huge concern on Android when the big Android devices started showing up. Remember the days when your Android phone couldn't even last 8 hours in your pocket at work? That is when the big Androids started showing up, and Apple introduced large phones after that.)
3) Most people don't use PCs anymore, so their phone is their only computing device.
These three concerns obviously weigh into the equation in addition to usability on public transit.
But really, New York is kind of unique in how over-capacity the transit system is. Tokyo is similar. Bought a Japanese phone recently?
I'm pretty sure that phablets are primarily due to demand, either by consumers or developers. Market research certainly indicates that users engage more with larger screen sizes
People buy them for sure, but I'm pretty sure that market research is not why they were invented. People were not carrying around Nexus 7s in their pockets, which are not much bigger than current phablets but predated the existence of them.
Yes, that's true, but at the same time, flip phones remain(ed) popular in Japan for years after smartphones took over the West due to their physical keypads and small size.
My experience was that flip phones remained popular in Japan for 2 reasons: corporations that didn't want to pay for data plans for their employees, and elderly people who were more comfortable with buttons. Never heard anyone here say they have one for the size (although they may very well exist)
Japanese is a lot less cumbersome to type on a numeric keypad than English. (The common input method was that every key had a consonant and the number of times you pressed the key was the vowel. Current touchscreen input methods are very similar, using the position for the consonant and a swipe direction (up/down/left/right/none) for the vowel. Wayyyy better than having 26+ touch targets on your tiny screen for English.)
Ahh, you nailed it and I've bitten my metaphorical tongue to avoid saying loudly: the damned mobile phone ecosystem is designed and tested by people in giant suburban, car environments like California. Not subway takers. Not pedestrians. The giant two-handed phone design obviously is torture on a subway. With navigation buttons even Andre the Giant would have had trouble reaching.
You know what else, though, shows the bias? Apps that think they're always connected to data. Even Spotify, with its glorious offline ability to play music, hangs stupidly in its main home screens (the one that has the we-made-this-for-you playlists). Other video playing apps with no real caching or notification or awareness to the user when there's no data.
There are many examples of blind spinning waiting type hanging behavior, as if no one can fathom using a phone during a commute that isn't in a car (or a red yellow and green type of bus?)