Yes, But Will It Fit In My Pocket?

Glendale, CA - Is bigger always better? Maybe it's a human thing, but it seems like we're attracted to things that are bigger than what we already have. Bigger TVs. Bigger houses. Bigger screens on our mobile phones.

When does a mobile phone get too big? Remember in the 90s every manufacturer was about making phones smaller? Today, everyone except Apple seems to be pushing the envelope on how big phones can be.

If you've been to the AT&T Store lately, you'll see what I'm talking about. Try it. Walk in there and ask for phone suggestions. The store employee will probably ask you about the screen size you're looking for, and show you some of their large options. At the store in El Cerrito, CA, they pitched me the Samsung Infuse (this was a while ago when the Infuse was the new hot ticket), a phone which branded itself as having the largest screen on any Samsung smartphone available.

The first thing I did was put the demo model in my front pocket to test "pocketability." It fit pretty well thanks to its thinness, but the large flat profile made it feel like I had a plank of wood pushing on my leg whenever I sat down.

Samsung seems to have swallowed the BIGGER SCREEN = BETTER PHONE pill, or at least it's trying to get the part of the market that loves big screens. Recently I found myself gawking at bigger screens. I saw a video of Tom Cruise using a massive smartphone to hunt his enemy in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, and thought, "I kind of want a huge smartphone now."

Don't you want a smartphone that big?

The price you pay is in the battery life. Apple has found the sweet spot in screen size and performance, it seems. The iPhone 4 and 4s are always at the upper quartile of battery performance in the market.

I do think that my iPad could be smaller, though. It's a great size for a tablet computer, but it's not pocketable. Have you seen the Kindle Fire? Even though that "tablet" comes nowhere close to iPad's capabilities, it comes in a really nice size. It's small enough for a girl's purse, and even for your jacket pocket.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is currently the largest "smartphone" I know of. I put "smartphone" in quotation marks because it's more of a tablet with a phone number. The screen is 5.3" from corner to corner, and it makes you look like a total geek when you put it up to your ear to talk. It comes with its own stylus (exactly what Steve Jobs wanted to avoid when designing the iPhone, ironically) and lets you take handwritten notes on it. I think it's a pretty slick device, but I'm not rich enough to fork over $700 for an unlocked version. The battery life is also very good, I hear. It seems that once you pass a certain size point, you're able to put in a bigger battery while still keeping the phone thin.

The Samsung Galaxy Note. Yeah, it's big.

(Image: http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/09/03/note_1.jpg)

I don't know how well Samsung's Galaxy Note will sell. It clearly has the biggest screen of any Android "smartphone" available. Maybe if it came with Ice Cream Sandwich it would be a wild success (it would be a pleasure to use the video chat feature with that screen size), but right now it ships with Honeycomb out of the box.

Note: Some of the product links in this post go through Amazon Associates.