Can small screen phones exist in a market dominated by big screen phones?

So, the question is what do I end up using the big screen the most for? The answer is taking calls, socialising on WhatsApp and maybe going through a few emails. Seems anti-climactic to me, especially with hype and hoopla the companies make when they tout what you can use the screen for.

The thing is that the smartphone industry is stagnant and it has been for a while. When they are not aping design trends from Google or Apple, most companies simply put the top of the line hardware and the biggest screen size they can cram into a chassis without draining your battery supply dead within minutes and call it a day.

These days phones are not really meant for one-handed use, they are often designed with the philosophy of giving users options, too many on some occasions and while that is a sound concept on paper, maybe it is time companies take a step back and realise ergonomics matter too.

The phablet or how I learned to stop worrying and accept that big screen sizes were now a thing

Let us take a small trip down memory lane to 2011, small phones are still popular, and the 7-inch tablet is still a thing. In fact, any screen size about 6.5-inches is automatically categorised a tablet as opposed to a smartphone. Then, Samsung came along and changed everything.

The Samsung Galaxy Note became the first phablet. An unfortunately named portmanteau of a phone and you guessed it, tablet. The very first Note smartphone was an experiment, a test of the waters so to speak, to see if anyone would bite. Unsurprisingly, the concept proved extremely popular in Asian countries, where households often had to compromise on having either a high-end phone or a tablet. In a genius move, Samsung solved both problems and the industry caught on.

Slowly, we saw other companies aping what Samsung was doing and given the immense popularity of Note series at the time, bigger screen sizes were a differentiating factor in a market that was starting to drown in the hardcore specifications war.

With top-of-the-line hardware already putting the power of a small laptop in your hands, companies needed something to differentiate themselves from the competition and for a while, it became an increasingly mind-numbing joust to see who could cram a large screen into a vertical chassis without making it unwieldy.

The after effects of the so-called ‘size war’ was that bigger screens were now becoming mainstream and any phone without at least a 6-inch screen was becoming increasingly irrelevant and slowly, the smaller screens started to fade away.

The smartphone market stagnation

It is a fact that most businesses like to play it safe. Especially true if you are competing in a market that only has so many spots in the top five. You either aim to be there with great designs and user experience or you simply follow the herd. Sadly, most manufacturers opted for the latter, and eventually, the practice of cramming super high-end hardware on a mobile device reached a point where it started to seem like overkill.

Combined with Google’s free-from reign over the smartphone market meant that many great companies from the past like Nokia and Motorola ended up being bought out or shut down entirely. The Android market was just drowning in options, everything and every price point seemed like a steal. Hardware was front and centre on every PR decision the companies made, and it is what is to blame for what most people talking about “How much RAM or processor power one phone has compared to the other”. Sadly, the one important thing that got lost in all the noise was the importance of design.

Let me ask you a question, why is it that people often compare hardware the phone has, touting numbers they probably got from a user manual to judge which phone is better? Is that really a thing you should judge phones on?

Okay, that was more than one question, but think about it if you have two phones that are world’s apart in terms of pricing, but feature hardware that is likely more than enough to get you through a day without any problems. What makes people pay for the expensive one?

It is the user experience. It is one thing having a swiss-army knife of a phone that claims to do everything, but does nothing in particular well while on the other, you have a phone that is expensive and does probably one or two things well, but does them REALLY, really well.

The other thing to consider is that the more expensive phone likely had a design period where everything was planned, every touch you make on the screen tested and tons of talented UI designers poured their heart into making it a great experience for the end-user. On the other hand, the cheaper phone probably did not have that much time put into the design phase, it probably already had the design because it aped what others are doing and simply chose to phone it in when it came to the experience.

Now tell me, what would you rather have? A cheaper phone that claims to do a million things and does them all poorly or the more expensive phone that spent time in pre-production and took pains to make the user experience seamless.

The revenge of the mini’s

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact made a lot of noise in 2014. It did not sell well and did Sony absolutely no favours when it was scoffed at by a lot of editorial pundits, but it did prove one thing. In an era of over-sized phones that required special cases of their own to be lugged around in, this 4.3-inch device still found a market. It showed that people were still willing to take a chance on smaller screen sizes, especially for a normal user who would not use the phone the way tinkerers would.

The ergonomics of one-handed smartphone use has many implications and for some were a welcome change in the face of ghastly, overpowered large screen devices that would be better off being a tablet instead.

The movement that the Z1 compact started has now coalesced in the announcement and the popularity of the iPhone 12 mini. Apple does not have the sales yet to prove that there is a segment of the audience that wants experience instead of overpowered hardware and useless software, so let’s hope this trend continues.

In the end, all smartphones can and will co-exist. It’s the user who has to make a choice, and if enough people vote with their wallets, companies will perk their ears up and listen.