I'm in the market for a new phone right now, and it's baffling how ridiculously big most phones are right now. I only use mine for instant messaging and browsing Hacker News. 5" is more than enough for that.
Here is a comparison between a few phones: https://phonesized.com/compare/#1784,1862,1863,365,632,126 (the Zenfone 9 is not in the database yet, but it's almost identical at the Zenfone 8).
What I find more interesting is that their website focus so much on it being compact, but it's actually just pretty much the same size as the regular iphone.
I like it how in your comparison that these modern "compact" phones are almost the same size as the Note 3 which was a phablet when it came out.
If 5.9" were ridiculously large (it is), then so is anything bigger, including the phone that must contain the 5.9" screen.
A 'smaller' screen can actually be larger in area. Take the 5.7 inch note 3 mentioned earlier.
https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5665&idPhone2=1...
Its screen is nearly 7% larger than the 5.9 inch zenphone 9. Skinnier aspect ratios exaggerate the growth in phone screen sizes.
http://www.displaywars.com/5,9-inch-d%7B20x9%7D-vs-5,7-inch-...
One of my earliest smartphones was 4.2". That was already problematic for my hand. 5" is too large, 5.9" is out of question. I don't want a tablet for a phone. I want a phone that I can use with just one hand and still reach all corners of the screen comfortably with my thumb from a firm grip (i.e. not from the side, but with the bottom right corner firmly tucked in the palm of my hand, if that makes sense). And my hands are not even small.
The phone, or the screen? The Nexus 5S was the last phone I owned that I could comfortable hold and had a 4.9" screen (diagonal), but with a 70.8% screen-to-body ratio (5.43 inches tall). This Zenfone 9 has a 5.9 inches screen (diagonal) but is less than 1cm taller, and exactly as wide as the Nexus 5S.
Face it, you're a tiny minority. My wife made fun of my iPhone Pro Max, until she inherited my old one and now she can't go back, it's huge but the screen real estate is really nice to have.
I see what you did there. Anyway, I’m in the tiny minority.
1. They want OLED which has nothing to do with the phone size. I strongly prefer avoiding OLED because I prefer longevity / not having burn-in.
2. Hole punch front camera: I'd like to avoid any sort of notch/punch/deviation from standard rectangularish screens.
3. 2 rear cameras: I don't care. At least this one isn't a bad choice like the others, I just don't care.
and that is in their "must have" section, so I cannot commit my support.
All walls must fall looks cool, I'll have to check it out.
Thank you! Let me know what you think of it. :- )
Why are screens getting so big? So they can shove more ads?
We could solve two problems at once: get rid of a camera bump and make the battery bigger at the same time by using the extra space of the camera bump to house a bigger battery.
Not sure why it hasn't happened yet or if it has I don't know if it.
I mean, we kinda do when it comes to EVs.
It takes 60 seconds to fill and fuel tank, it takes 60 minutes (if you're lucky) to fill an EV.
One is an insignificant amount of time, relatively speaking.
The person you're replying to isn't making the right comparison; do we care about waiting/wasting 1 minute vs 60+ minutes?
I sure as shit do.
Yes. I can't tell you why they thought it was important, but in my childhood I've heard multiple adults talk about "My car goes <x> miles before a fill-up". Never made sense to me, gas stations are everywhere and filling up is quick.
Gas stations are not everywhere, and can be few and far between on certain routes, and more to the point filling up being quick may be the normal conditions, but if you are old enough (or have lived in the right–or maybe wrong would be more accurate–places even without being that old), you have experience of times when filling up has not been quick, or even, on any given day for any given car, necessarily permitted.
Apple switched to a larger screen size not because they thought it was better but their phones were losing out in showrooms to the larger Galaxy phones.
Because that's what companies make. There are examples of smaller phones that were not successful, but they sucked for one reason or another.
Zenfone 9 is 2mm taller and 1mm narrower.
Lying in bed, on the bus, in the classroom, etc - less time to sit down in the living room and watch youtube/movies on the TV - especially with the TikTok(/vine?) generation latching onto vertical video formats too.
I think it's just a generational thing - I remember being amazed at how people are consuming vertical video now like it's anything else when 5-10 years ago people would give the cameraman grief for filming this "crazy moment!" in vertical format :P
Imho the move to higher than 16:9 aspect ratios has really made it harder to talk about screen size.
This is so true. Typing this on a Mi A2 Lite released in 2018 rocking a custom A11 ungoogled ROM and squeezing almost 3 days of battery life out of it. It's screen size is 5.84" and it's perfect. I refuse to go any bigger.
Tallness doesn't make phones uncomfortable to hold (width does), it just makes them poke out of your pockets.
No regrets.
The mini was big enough already to occasionally being forced to activate single hand mode.
But superior gestures navigation makes Zenfone so much easier to use with one hand.