9 ms·

The Phablet Era

59 points by worldvoyageur 11y ago

lmm 11y ago
> This trend is driving other trends like the rise of consumption activities on the phone: 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? (Feeling unreasonably pleased as this is one tech trend I managed to call and was ahead of the curve on)
TheBiv 11y ago
"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." I don't believe the data Flurry presented can lead us to say that the device format is driving changes in usage. I believe that looking at usage, per device, you're actually just segmenting the usage of the demographic that purchases that device. 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)
suvelx 11y ago
> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet) Is that because that's nearly all you can buy in the mid-high end these days?
Eric_WVGG 11y ago
A few problems with the predictions... 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. 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! 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...)
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  #2 is correct (at least for me). I want to replace my iPhone 5 with something newer from Apple but can't. So I'm not adding to the phablet bar but I'm also not adding to the 4" bar. Of course, as soon as there is a "6C" I'm likely to buy it.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    If Apple isn't making the product you want, why not buy a big ass Android or Windows phone and use until Apple does? Waiting on Apple's product-feature matrix roadmap is a tradeoff too. It just happens to involve certain current "unhappiness" for possible future "unhappiness", that is the pain/pleasure ratio of Android or Windows may be less than that of the unfilled want. Perhaps reducing the dependency chain is worth trying here to?
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > Of course small phones would fare badly when nothing good is for sale! It sounds like you're treating the introduction of new phone models as an exogenous event, but that's crazy. That's like saying "Of course people don't ride horse-and-buggies any more; hardly anybody make them! That doesn't mean cars are the future." If manufacturers are introducing fewer models, it's because there is reduced demand for them.
  - Eric_WVGG 11y ago
    You need some period of overlap in order to measure reduced demand. If every horse dropped dead the day cars went on sale, that says nothing about reduced demand for horses. Thank you for introducing me to the word "exogenous"
    - sigmar 11y ago
      The samsung note was released in 2011. I'm not sure what the average upgrade cycle is at the moment, but IMHO that seems like sufficient overlap that owners of the original note would have returned to smaller phones if they preferred them. They don't.
grabcocque 11y ago
Phablet is such an ugly portmanteau. Let's stick to calling them "huge-ass phones".
- pantalaimon 11y ago
  https://xkcd.com/37/ https://xkcd.com/37/ scnr
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    That's still a good description of these devices.
colinramsay 11y ago
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. It's a compromise, and not one which I really like. I can't see much of an alternative though.
- signal11 11y ago
  It may have something to do with the iPhone's aspect ratio and UI. I have small hands and my 6S (not 6S Plus) is indeed too big; however I find the LG G3 (which has a bigger screen IIRC) quite usable one-handed. Maybe that's because of Android's UI, where the back button and app switcher are easily reachable with one's thumb, towards the bottom of the screen. I still haven't mastered the art of using one-handed 3D touch to invoke the iOS app-switcher -- I have to use my other hand or double-press the home button.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The alternative is multiple devices that are cheap and work together seamlessly (I guess the first step is phone companies offering data only plans).
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    Every major carrier offers a data-only plan; they're typically used for tablets, although Samsung made a connected camera and LG made a connected watch (that was pulled off the market after less than a week).
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Yeah I guess I should have expanded that some, separate data and messaging/phone number have to become popular more than they have to be offered. I took some note of the LG watch and commented about it here, at which point someone pointed out that the Samsung Gear S has been available since 2014. I guess the tech to jam a cell phone in a watch will be mass market ready in 1 or 2 more generations (the Gear S is huge). Then the price point just needs to come down a bit.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
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".
- pantalaimon 11y ago
  But bigger really is better when it comes to displaying content. Sure at some point handilyness begins to suffer, but it seems there is a sweet spot at 5.5". I wouldn't want a bigger phone at that point, but I don't want to go back to a smaller one either.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  >> I think this is largely due to "bigger is better" mentality of marketing (and consumers). I'm not sure this is the case. Ask anyone over 40 whose near-vision eyesight is starting to decline, and they'll tell you that there is a real-world problem with reading text on a smaller screen. I fall into that category. All other things being equal, I'd choose the smaller device, but a bigger screen enables me to set the font larger and read content in short bursts without having to pull out my reading glasses as well.
dovdov 11y ago
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.
ommunist 11y ago
The HN effect. MySQL is down at avc.com
anir 11y ago
> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet) o.O This term is so abused...'normal distribution'. My boss would use it all the time without even knowing the parameters. It ain't normal distribution. This is categorical data which in this case can be fitted with a multinomial distribution.
- svantana 11y ago
  Even worse, the numbers are differences, which can take on negative numbers as well, so it doesn't even make sense to talk about a distribution (in the probability sense). I read the AVC blog once in a while as I feel he's a pretty well-informed investor, but I often get the feeling he doesn't understand the most basic mathematical/technical concepts. I guess he has a "numbers guy" for that stuff...
bramjans 11y ago
I believe the increase in "phablet" users is also thanks to emerging markets getting connected. 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.
- signal11 11y ago
  Users in Hong Kong (which has great internet access and where presumably the phone is not the only internet devide) appear to like large phones too. It seems counterintuitive but these phones were mostly being used two-handed, and their users had jackets/man-bags/handbags. I wonder if the reason is that users who use Chinese IMEs find the larger screen more convenient to write and view a decent amount of data at the same time.
f_ 11y ago
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. [1] http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/JesseSchell/index.php http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/Jesse...
StevePerkins 11y ago
Link is dead with a "Error establishing a database connection" message. 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? 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.
- fps 11y ago
  avc.com is Fred Wilson's (a venture capitalist) personal blog. It gets regularly linked off of HN, so i'm surprised that it's down. Judging by the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zpcZCGts6iMJ:avc.com/2016/01/the-phablet-era/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zpcZCGt... It's a simple static blog entry with disqus comments. There's no good reason for it to be hitting a database on every request.
- dschep 11y ago
  Wappalyzer[0] reports that he's running WordPress. [0]https://wappalyzer.com/download https://wappalyzer.com/download
Chirael 11y ago
Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://avc.com/2016/01/the-phablet-era/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...
w8rbt 11y ago
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.
krampian 11y ago
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.
gshrikant 11y ago
It makes me a little sad that simply making screens bigger (for whatever purpose) is considered technological progress. 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. 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.
moron4hire 11y ago
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. 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.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  > ...VR/AR will make the screen go away completely. Sorry. No, it's not. And no, people are most certainly not going to want to be seen with a headset on (outside of playing games).
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    "nuh uh" "yuh huh" "nuh uh" "yuh huh" It's not going to be Oculus Rift style boxes on faces. There are already AR systems in final product development that are more the size of ski goggles. I personally know of one system in R&D that is the size of aviator sunglasses. The fashion industry 100% tells people what they will want to wear. If Facebook is smart, they'll be partnering with major fashion designers in a year, and you'll start seeing AR headsets incorporated into fashion shows in 2 years.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  Like how everyone wears bluetooth earpieces now, right? :P If I recall correctly, bluetooth earpieces went through a 15 minutes of fame "oh cool" public reaction followed by un-ending "ugh, what an asshole" as everyone had the experience of answering someone saying "hello" at the grocery store and then realizing they were talking on their bluetooth.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    The problem is that Bluetooth headsets are universally shitty devices. You only wear them to be conspicuous, and by now everyone knows the emperor has no clothes. There is a lot more money going in to HMDs than Bluetooth earpieces. I would not be surprised to see an AR headset, about the size of large pair of aviator sunglasses, on a model on a fashion runway in 2 years.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
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. 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.
- zuron7 11y ago
  In Indian colleges we're even encourage to use our phone in class for computer science. Android has got quite a few apps for programming languages.
k__ 11y ago
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. Long battery and I can use it for most things I did on a tablet. 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 :\
bakhy 11y ago
the smartphone market is crap. it seems almost like the economy of a communist country - everything is the same. 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). 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.
- jerf 11y ago
  We seem to be in the tail end of a consolidation phase right now, the one the article is about. I think it's largely brought on by the final commodification of the internals of a phone/tablet; even a $50 Amazon Fire tablet is now a decent tablet, something that wasn't true in that price range two years ago and perhaps even one (I wasn't looking then so I can't quite vouch for it). (Yes, it's probably subsidized a bit, but it still ends up setting the bar.) Once that completes, I'd expect the market to expand a bit more as companies seek ways to stand out other than "we have the cheapest thing". But you may never again see a "phone" with a physical keyboard. Too niche. Instead, you'll have to look for a case with integrated keyboard or something: http://www.amazon.com/Sliding-out-Wireless-Bluetooth-keyboard-backlight/dp/B00NOM34WW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452087874&sr=8-1&keywords=iphone+keyboard+case http://www.amazon.com/Sliding-out-Wireless-Bluetooth-keyboar... I don't think it'll ever be economical again to produce a phone with a keyboard built in, but that niche can be filled with orders-of-magnitude-smaller runs of keyboard cases.
  - bakhy 11y ago
    the case with a keyboard is an interesting suggestion, thank you!
    - likeclockwork 11y ago
      BlackBerry Priv has a keyboard.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
Manufacturers are riding the large screen wave in my opinion because of two reasons: 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..." 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. 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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Sujan 11y ago
There's a little problem with the article: > The most interesting stat I saw in the report is this chart about device distribution in 2015: > 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 Actually the graph shows the growth 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. Of course the rest of the post is still correct, though.
rplnt 11y ago
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.
rayiner 11y ago
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.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  There's also the chunk of the population with vision problems like presbyopia. I just upgraded my Moto G to a Moto X Play, and the pocketability hasn't been adversely impacted. My new, bigger, phone doesn't really feel bigger in the pocket (thanks to thinness and smallish bezels), and I can't really tell the difference. The best thing is that I can set the font size to Huge and read the screen with only a little squinting without having to pull out my reading glasses. I don't think there's any way I could go back to a screen the size of an iPhone 4/5.
  - fluxquanta 11y ago
    There's also those of us who are just bigger people. From fingertip to palm my hands are on the order of 10 inches long. The standard phones of a few years ago were incredibly difficult for me to use. I still have an iPhone 4S that I use in a speaker dock for media and I can easily (and regularly) press 4 keys at once with one touch. That said, there's clearly a market for smaller phones still, just not from me, and I don't understand why the manufacturers don't see this.
- berns 11y ago
  I would say: For a big chunk of the population in developed countries. If you saw a person get one of those big things to take a call on a crowded bus you would realize how inappropriate they can be. (But of course nobody talks on their phones anymore.)
  - csixty4 11y ago
    A lot of people around here use their earbuds to talk on the phone. It's especially handy if you're already listening to music when someone calls. I'm not sure how popular that is outside Boston, though.

59 points by worldvoyageur 11y ago

lmm 11y ago

> This trend is driving other trends like the rise of consumption activities on the phone: 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? (Feeling unreasonably pleased as this is one tech trend I managed to call and was ahead of the curve on)

TheBiv 11y ago

"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." I don't believe the data Flurry presented can lead us to say that the device format is driving changes in usage. I believe that looking at usage, per device, you're actually just segmenting the usage of the demographic that purchases that device. 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)

suvelx 11y ago

> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet) Is that because that's nearly all you can buy in the mid-high end these days?

Eric_WVGG 11y ago

A few problems with the predictions... 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. 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! 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...)

jgrahamc 11y ago
#2 is correct (at least for me). I want to replace my iPhone 5 with something newer from Apple but can't. So I'm not adding to the phablet bar but I'm also not adding to the 4" bar. Of course, as soon as there is a "6C" I'm likely to buy it.
- brudgers 11y ago
  If Apple isn't making the product you want, why not buy a big ass Android or Windows phone and use until Apple does? Waiting on Apple's product-feature matrix roadmap is a tradeoff too. It just happens to involve certain current "unhappiness" for possible future "unhappiness", that is the pain/pleasure ratio of Android or Windows may be less than that of the unfilled want. Perhaps reducing the dependency chain is worth trying here to?
jessriedel 11y ago
> Of course small phones would fare badly when nothing good is for sale! It sounds like you're treating the introduction of new phone models as an exogenous event, but that's crazy. That's like saying "Of course people don't ride horse-and-buggies any more; hardly anybody make them! That doesn't mean cars are the future." If manufacturers are introducing fewer models, it's because there is reduced demand for them.
- Eric_WVGG 11y ago
  You need some period of overlap in order to measure reduced demand. If every horse dropped dead the day cars went on sale, that says nothing about reduced demand for horses. Thank you for introducing me to the word "exogenous"
  - sigmar 11y ago
    The samsung note was released in 2011. I'm not sure what the average upgrade cycle is at the moment, but IMHO that seems like sufficient overlap that owners of the original note would have returned to smaller phones if they preferred them. They don't.

grabcocque 11y ago

Phablet is such an ugly portmanteau. Let's stick to calling them "huge-ass phones".

pantalaimon 11y ago
https://xkcd.com/37/ https://xkcd.com/37/ scnr
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  That's still a good description of these devices.

colinramsay 11y ago

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. It's a compromise, and not one which I really like. I can't see much of an alternative though.

signal11 11y ago
It may have something to do with the iPhone's aspect ratio and UI. I have small hands and my 6S (not 6S Plus) is indeed too big; however I find the LG G3 (which has a bigger screen IIRC) quite usable one-handed. Maybe that's because of Android's UI, where the back button and app switcher are easily reachable with one's thumb, towards the bottom of the screen. I still haven't mastered the art of using one-handed 3D touch to invoke the iOS app-switcher -- I have to use my other hand or double-press the home button.
maxerickson 11y ago
The alternative is multiple devices that are cheap and work together seamlessly (I guess the first step is phone companies offering data only plans).
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  Every major carrier offers a data-only plan; they're typically used for tablets, although Samsung made a connected camera and LG made a connected watch (that was pulled off the market after less than a week).
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Yeah I guess I should have expanded that some, separate data and messaging/phone number have to become popular more than they have to be offered. I took some note of the LG watch and commented about it here, at which point someone pointed out that the Samsung Gear S has been available since 2014. I guess the tech to jam a cell phone in a watch will be mass market ready in 1 or 2 more generations (the Gear S is huge). Then the price point just needs to come down a bit.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

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".

pantalaimon 11y ago
But bigger really is better when it comes to displaying content. Sure at some point handilyness begins to suffer, but it seems there is a sweet spot at 5.5". I wouldn't want a bigger phone at that point, but I don't want to go back to a smaller one either.
slantyyz 11y ago
>> I think this is largely due to "bigger is better" mentality of marketing (and consumers). I'm not sure this is the case. Ask anyone over 40 whose near-vision eyesight is starting to decline, and they'll tell you that there is a real-world problem with reading text on a smaller screen. I fall into that category. All other things being equal, I'd choose the smaller device, but a bigger screen enables me to set the font larger and read content in short bursts without having to pull out my reading glasses as well.

dovdov 11y ago

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.

ommunist 11y ago

The HN effect. MySQL is down at avc.com

anir 11y ago

> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet) o.O This term is so abused...'normal distribution'. My boss would use it all the time without even knowing the parameters. It ain't normal distribution. This is categorical data which in this case can be fitted with a multinomial distribution.

svantana 11y ago
Even worse, the numbers are differences, which can take on negative numbers as well, so it doesn't even make sense to talk about a distribution (in the probability sense). I read the AVC blog once in a while as I feel he's a pretty well-informed investor, but I often get the feeling he doesn't understand the most basic mathematical/technical concepts. I guess he has a "numbers guy" for that stuff...

bramjans 11y ago

I believe the increase in "phablet" users is also thanks to emerging markets getting connected. 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.

signal11 11y ago
Users in Hong Kong (which has great internet access and where presumably the phone is not the only internet devide) appear to like large phones too. It seems counterintuitive but these phones were mostly being used two-handed, and their users had jackets/man-bags/handbags. I wonder if the reason is that users who use Chinese IMEs find the larger screen more convenient to write and view a decent amount of data at the same time.

f_ 11y ago

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. [1] http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/JesseSchell/index.php http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/Jesse...

StevePerkins 11y ago

Link is dead with a "Error establishing a database connection" message. 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? 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.

fps 11y ago
avc.com is Fred Wilson's (a venture capitalist) personal blog. It gets regularly linked off of HN, so i'm surprised that it's down. Judging by the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zpcZCGts6iMJ:avc.com/2016/01/the-phablet-era/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zpcZCGt... It's a simple static blog entry with disqus comments. There's no good reason for it to be hitting a database on every request.
dschep 11y ago
Wappalyzer[0] reports that he's running WordPress. [0]https://wappalyzer.com/download https://wappalyzer.com/download

Chirael 11y ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://avc.com/2016/01/the-phablet-era/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

w8rbt 11y ago

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.

krampian 11y ago

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.

gshrikant 11y ago

It makes me a little sad that simply making screens bigger (for whatever purpose) is considered technological progress. 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. 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.

moron4hire 11y ago

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. 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.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
> ...VR/AR will make the screen go away completely. Sorry. No, it's not. And no, people are most certainly not going to want to be seen with a headset on (outside of playing games).
- moron4hire 11y ago
  "nuh uh" "yuh huh" "nuh uh" "yuh huh" It's not going to be Oculus Rift style boxes on faces. There are already AR systems in final product development that are more the size of ski goggles. I personally know of one system in R&D that is the size of aviator sunglasses. The fashion industry 100% tells people what they will want to wear. If Facebook is smart, they'll be partnering with major fashion designers in a year, and you'll start seeing AR headsets incorporated into fashion shows in 2 years.
RankingMember 11y ago
Like how everyone wears bluetooth earpieces now, right? :P If I recall correctly, bluetooth earpieces went through a 15 minutes of fame "oh cool" public reaction followed by un-ending "ugh, what an asshole" as everyone had the experience of answering someone saying "hello" at the grocery store and then realizing they were talking on their bluetooth.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  The problem is that Bluetooth headsets are universally shitty devices. You only wear them to be conspicuous, and by now everyone knows the emperor has no clothes. There is a lot more money going in to HMDs than Bluetooth earpieces. I would not be surprised to see an AR headset, about the size of large pair of aviator sunglasses, on a model on a fashion runway in 2 years.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

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. 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.

zuron7 11y ago
In Indian colleges we're even encourage to use our phone in class for computer science. Android has got quite a few apps for programming languages.

k__ 11y ago

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. Long battery and I can use it for most things I did on a tablet. 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 :\

bakhy 11y ago

the smartphone market is crap. it seems almost like the economy of a communist country - everything is the same. 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). 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.

jerf 11y ago
We seem to be in the tail end of a consolidation phase right now, the one the article is about. I think it's largely brought on by the final commodification of the internals of a phone/tablet; even a $50 Amazon Fire tablet is now a decent tablet, something that wasn't true in that price range two years ago and perhaps even one (I wasn't looking then so I can't quite vouch for it). (Yes, it's probably subsidized a bit, but it still ends up setting the bar.) Once that completes, I'd expect the market to expand a bit more as companies seek ways to stand out other than "we have the cheapest thing". But you may never again see a "phone" with a physical keyboard. Too niche. Instead, you'll have to look for a case with integrated keyboard or something: http://www.amazon.com/Sliding-out-Wireless-Bluetooth-keyboard-backlight/dp/B00NOM34WW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452087874&sr=8-1&keywords=iphone+keyboard+case http://www.amazon.com/Sliding-out-Wireless-Bluetooth-keyboar... I don't think it'll ever be economical again to produce a phone with a keyboard built in, but that niche can be filled with orders-of-magnitude-smaller runs of keyboard cases.
- bakhy 11y ago
  the case with a keyboard is an interesting suggestion, thank you!
  - likeclockwork 11y ago
    BlackBerry Priv has a keyboard.

cmrdporcupine 11y ago

Manufacturers are riding the large screen wave in my opinion because of two reasons: 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..." 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. 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.

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Sujan 11y ago

There's a little problem with the article: > The most interesting stat I saw in the report is this chart about device distribution in 2015: > 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 Actually the graph shows the growth 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. Of course the rest of the post is still correct, though.

rplnt 11y ago

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.

rayiner 11y ago

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.

slantyyz 11y ago
There's also the chunk of the population with vision problems like presbyopia. I just upgraded my Moto G to a Moto X Play, and the pocketability hasn't been adversely impacted. My new, bigger, phone doesn't really feel bigger in the pocket (thanks to thinness and smallish bezels), and I can't really tell the difference. The best thing is that I can set the font size to Huge and read the screen with only a little squinting without having to pull out my reading glasses. I don't think there's any way I could go back to a screen the size of an iPhone 4/5.
- fluxquanta 11y ago
  There's also those of us who are just bigger people. From fingertip to palm my hands are on the order of 10 inches long. The standard phones of a few years ago were incredibly difficult for me to use. I still have an iPhone 4S that I use in a speaker dock for media and I can easily (and regularly) press 4 keys at once with one touch. That said, there's clearly a market for smaller phones still, just not from me, and I don't understand why the manufacturers don't see this.
berns 11y ago
I would say: For a big chunk of the population in developed countries. If you saw a person get one of those big things to take a call on a crowded bus you would realize how inappropriate they can be. (But of course nobody talks on their phones anymore.)
- csixty4 11y ago
  A lot of people around here use their earbuds to talk on the phone. It's especially handy if you're already listening to music when someone calls. I'm not sure how popular that is outside Boston, though.