The Phablet Era
avc.com
avc.com
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...)
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.
Thank you for introducing me to the word "exogenous"
Often I don't want to have a huge phone with me at all, but then I don't have a choice. The long term may be some sort of personal communicator (watch or otherwise.) Small screen, advanced input when necessary by voice. When people want to read things, write messages, watch video, play games, etc, then they can pick up their phablet -- which is effectively a phone sized tablet that fits in your pocket.
The Apple Watch probably is the step towards this direction. However, because it needs the iPhone it misses the full use case, for the moment.
Back when cars were supplanting the horse-drawn carriage, people had choice for years. Even today, if you prefer, you can get a horse and the carriage to drive around in. But you can't find specialty shops building that small phone you want.
It's hard to keep a smartphone for more than a couple of years because the industry moves on and drops you like a hot potato.
That assumes manufacturers solely pay attention to demand before making and selling a device. Which is wrong. They pay attention to what carriers want. Which is usually what will help them sell expensive data plans. Also, companies care about what Samsung is selling. In Samsung's case they care about what components they themselves supply to other companies (SoC's, OLED's etc.). So it's in their best interest to keep them in demand.
http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/?cat=umtsover&asd=on&asuc... says that right now, android phones up to 55m width have at most 512MB RAM, so they'll be sluggish or worse.
There's also the fact that what people use their phone for has radically changed in the past few years. Small phones are great for talking because they're light and easy to hold, and they're great for portability when they're not being used, but the number of minutes spent talking to people is continuing to fall, while the popularity of messaging and pictures is still growing - people want a device that's good for entering text and looking at images, and that necessitates a larger screen and keyboard.
A brilliant small phone would still do badly simply because the market for them is shrinking.
My choices are the 5.2" Nexus 5X or the 5.7" Moto X Pure. Both of which are WAYYY too big.
So yes this will skew stats towards larger screens, but it should not be construed as the will of the consumer. Just idiots in marketing trying to out stat each other.
I doubt this.
Apple never broke down their numbers to specific models (to my knowledge, link if you have a source).
The 13" models were much more popular in nearly all hardware surveys I'm aware of.
Which still doesn't prove anything, of course. Just saying my experience doesn't align with yours. A survey would be interesting.
we won't know till midway through the year if this new phablet size is the one to rule them all but it does solve the problem many have which is, why do we need so many devices that nearly duplicate each other, here is the common ground.
and please don't anyone point to watches like Apples which is a useless device if you don't have the phone to do the work. I don't pay four hundred plus bucks to have a device that needs another device to work
Because I can't fit a phablet in my trousers.
Or is this the trouser manufacturers fault?
Or in any of the pockets of my hydration pack when I'm running in the mountains. Or, as you say, in my pockets when I'm walking the dogs. I'd go on, but the point is I don't want a do-it-all device. I'm content with a small, iPhone 5-ish phone and a tablet or laptop when I'm home or otherwise sitting down for a bit. "Until <I> wear my phone on <my> wrist", I want a 4" phone, not the monstrosities (I include my iPhone 6s in that category) available today.
Remember when we used to gawk at how small that new Razor-whatever was? "Wow, we'll have those ST:NG comm badges someday soon!" Instead we got Samsung Notes.
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.
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...
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.
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-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.
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.
It's a compromise, and not one which I really like. I can't see much of an alternative though.
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.
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.
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.
Is that because that's nearly all you can buy in the mid-high end these days?
If typical mainstream phones are designed & built with a lead time of a year or more, & if a company was planning to release a small one soon, & that company was less secretive than Apple, we'd surely know about it already. There are rumours about Apple, and if they turn out not to be true, then we maybe have to conclude that no new small single-hander smartphone (as we know the device now) will ever appear again.
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.
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.
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.
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 :\
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)
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.
[1] http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/Jesse...
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.
Judging by the cached version: 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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.