A few problems with the predictions...<p>1. The first iOS "phablet" only happened in 2014, and was very late to market. This explains why phablet growth in 2014-15 is explosive, but does little to predict future growth.<p>2. We are now entering the second year of no significant new small phones being released for either iOS or Android. Of course small phones would fare badly when nothing good is for sale!<p>The best-selling iPod was the Nano, by a very large margin. The best-selling MacBooks were the 11" Air. If there is any truth to a "6C" coming out this year I expect it will do extremely well. (Unfortunately the days of the perfect 3.5" phones are likely behind us...)
> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet)<p>o.O This term is so abused...'normal distribution'. My boss would use it all the time without even knowing the parameters.<p>It ain't normal distribution. This is categorical data which in this case can be fitted with a multinomial distribution.
the smartphone market is crap. it seems almost like the economy of a communist country - everything is the same.<p>recently my husband and me were buying new phones. i had trouble finding a decent smartphone (decent = good specs) which is <= 4,5". incredibly annoying. i simply want a strong device that fits nicely in my pants pocket, and it seems that's a weird request... my husband wanted one with a physical keyboard - now that's science fiction. completely unavailable in Europe at the time (aside from ancient phones on eBay).<p>so, this trend analysis seems really ridiculous. consumers have a very limited choice in the matter. the companies behave like sheep, and most writing about the market is sycophantic crap.
I believe the increase in "phablet" users is also thanks to emerging markets getting connected.<p>While living in South America the amount of "big phones" really surprised me, as they seemed so impractical. When I realised after a while that many people used their phone as their only Internet device, it made a lot more sense.
My iPhone 6S is too big for my hand, so I dislike the size of the hardware, but there's no denying that the keyboard's a bit less fiddly and the screen real estate is nice.<p>It's a compromise, and not one which I really like. I can't see much of an alternative though.
Although I can't use my Nexus 6P (5.7") with one hand and it barely fits in my pocket, I love the screen real estate.<p>Actually, I've not used my laptop or iPad once since I got it a month ago. The mobile-first movement makes a lot of sense, and I can really appreciate how people in third-world countries use their phone as their only computer. The larger screen makes the whole experience significantly better, to the point I don't really miss my tablet or laptop. When I want a larger screen, which is frequently, I use the Chromecast.
> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet)<p>Is that because that's nearly all you can buy in the mid-high end these days?
To counterweight defenders of small phones. My wife, her mom, and my mom switched to the 6 plus (from 5s) the minute their contract was up. They didn't even ask about smaller phones. For a big chunk of the population (people who carry purses) the upper limit on cell phone size is not bounded by pocketability. That probably has a significant impact on the market.
It makes me a little sad that simply making screens bigger (for whatever purpose) is considered technological progress.<p>Most of the high-end phones now seem to settle around the 5+ inch margin, leaving those of us who need a good smaller phone with little to no choice.<p>Even with good build quality and lighter weight, I would take a phone I could physically hold in one hand over something which needs software gimmicks (Samsung) for one-hand use. Just one anecdotal datapoint.
Switched my 4" smartphone and 8" tablet for a 6" phablet (Ascend Mate) a few years ago and it was the best thing I did.<p>Long battery and I can use it for most things I did on a tablet.<p>But with mobile VR coming along right now, everything seems to be optimized for 5" smartphones. I would love to buy a P8 Max, but depending on the Oculus Rift pricing, my next phone will probably be a <6" thing :\
iPhone 6(S) Plus is way under-supported by the developers. It could display a split view just like the iPad, but check out how many apps take the advantage of this, see facebook, skype, youtube, etc. None of these. Twitter rotates landscape at least, but that's not support, just a feature ticked in Xcode.
> This trend is driving other trends like the rise of consumption activities on the phone:<p>I think the causation is backwards here. Growth in activities where a large screen is useful is driving the adoption of large-screen phones, surely?<p>(Feeling unreasonably pleased as this is one tech trend I managed to call and was ahead of the curve on)
Manufacturers are riding the large screen wave in my opinion because of two reasons:<p>1) Battery life is likely consumer's #1 complaint about their phones. If you have a big screen, you can pack a big battery under it.
2) "Arms-race" product differentiation ala "Mhz wars" on computers. "My screen is bigger than the last model..."<p>I miss my old Palm Pre phones. I don't need a big screen for checking my email and Facebook, doing some chats, some voice calls, playing some music, and reading the odd news article, which is what I use my phone for.<p>But as a consumer I am being forced down the large screen path, because that is all the market is offering for some time now.
I am somehow reminded of a snippet of a Jesse Schell talk back in 2010 [1] when he predicted convergence of technology in the pocket ... I, too, suspect devices are going to converge towards a device that can be held with both hands, has maximum screen real-estate and still fits in a pocket. One hand usage seems less important as the hold-to-ear phone aspect is slowly phased out as a valid use-case for these devices.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/JesseSchell/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/Jesse...</a>
Link is dead with a "Error establishing a database connection" message.<p>I'm not familiar with "avc.com", but I imagine that any entity with a three-letter domain name must have spent a fair amount of money establishing a web presence. So whichever CMS platform runs their site, how are they NOT using a standard cache plugin that pre-renders pages for articles?<p>There's no way that a professional CMS-driven website should completely go down over a broken database connection. My personal blog site only draws around 10K page views per MONTH, I only spend $5/mo hosting it, and this sort of outage wouldn't be possible.
"We are converging on a single device format in mobile and that’s driving some important changes in usage. We are in the phablet era."<p>I don't believe the data Flurry presented can lead us to say that the device format is driving changes in usage.<p>I believe that looking at usage, per device, you're actually just segmenting the usage of the demographic that purchases that device.<p>For example, Fred has a graph that shows medium sized phones have a 100%+ increase in Sports usage. That may be due to the fact that most medium sized phones are being bought by middle aged men (who drive the majority of sports usage)
There's a little problem with the article:<p>> The most interesting stat I saw in the report is this chart about device distribution in 2015:<p>> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet). There are still some people out there using smaller mobile phones and small tablets<p>Actually the graph shows the <i>growth</i> of time spent on devices, not total distribution of time spent. I'm sure total time shows quite a different thing than "some people" using small phones.<p>Of course the rest of the post is still correct, though.
It would be great if these phablets could make a room for smaller phones that don't suck. We already see proper "mini", "compact" phones, so let's hope they actually get mini and compact. Right now they would be laughed off as too big in the early days of smartphones.
We suspected this was going on when we looked at the analytics for our ecommerce sites recently and noticed a big shift away from tablets towards mobile (Google breaks them out separately). Large phones would of course fall under the latter category.
I think this is largely due to "bigger is better" mentality of marketing (and consumers).
All it will take is one OEM to make a popular smaller phone and all the other OEMs will start marketing to this "new segment".
In less developed countries where power is unreliable, small simple phones with long battery life dominate. The market demands a phone that can go at least three days and ideally five before requiring recharge. They can't charge power hungry phablets every day. Half or more of humanity live in these places. That should be taken into account when looking at these statistics.
This is all well and good, but in 3 to 5 years, VR/AR will make the screen go away completely. The shape of your device will be purely a fashion statement over any sort of feature requirement.<p>And yes, I think there will come a point where people will want to be seen with a headset on. It will be a form of conspicuous wealth signalling, like smartphones to begin with, smartwatches now, or long fingernails millennia ago. After the initial growing pains of "ugh, what an asshole", it will normalize and then everyone will do it.