Can we stop it with the comically big phones now? (2020)

I like wide phones more than big phones. I've never used phones one-handed, and stow them in a belly pouch.

I loved the original Note, and as it grew old, kept waiting for a phone just as wide. Instead manufacturers made phones taller. I'd say comically tall. The aspect ratio is out of whack for use as a phablet.

I ended up replacing it with a Huawei Mediapad X1, which is a true phablet, with the same nice 5:3 aspect ratio as the Note, but now full HD resolution at 7".

When it came time to retire, I couldn't find anything in that aspect ratio anymore, and went with a Huawei Mate20X. Although its display sounds bigger at 7.2", the 18.7:9 aspect ratio makes the display area much smaller.

Anecdotally, as my friends age I have noticed a few getting larger phones so they can accommodate a bigger font size and not own up to needing glasses. This correlates with them having more disposable income so is a market the manufacturers want to go after.

I am looking to buy a new phone now, and with every previous phone purchase I've got a slightly bigger phone because, as the article says, phones just keep getting bigger. Now it looks like 6.5" is "small" and you might find a 6.2" here or there. I'm not opposed to a slightly bigger screen, but my current phone is 5" and it looks like whatever I upgrade to probably won't pass the pocket test which is a bit annoying.

More powerful CPUs and GPUs for the games and the monstrous modern web pages --> larger batteries to feed them for hours --> larger screens to cover the larger body --> more pixels to drive --> larger CPUs and GPUs...

We now have 6-core and 8-core phones, with more CPU power than lower-end laptops, and often a comparable amount of RAM, say, 4-6GB. Also, the radio tract is not getting any simpler, or less power-hungry, with adding more and more standards and frequencies, without dropping the old ones.

How do you house all that? How do you power all that?

My idea is that the only way to get a smaller phone is to make it have fewer features, less resources, and thus lower weight and size. If you want the 4" size of iPhone 5C, prepare to the feature set not far exceeding that of iPhone 5C.

I spent a dozen years as phones became more and more manageable and light, from the almost-bricks of the very-late 80s to the small, shirt-pocket 'chocolate-bars' of the mid-noughties.

Just when I was happy with the size of my mobile phone, they started getting larger, less-manageable, and heavier again. I fully expect them to become as heavy and large and unmanageable as the half-bricks of the 80s in the near future.

At the moment I am refusing to upgrade my iPhone 5S because that's the largest size I want to go to.

"inch" metric is broken since all smartphone manufacturers start using non-16:9 displays since 2016. Manufacturer should put display height/width on spec instead of diagonal inches.

subtitle: "Android phone manufacturers have stopped making smaller phones. What gives?"

answer: Maybe the market has spoken and people simply like having big phones cause they can see and do things they like one them while still fitting in their pocket.