[sc:mobile-category ]I recently had an interesting conversation with some friends around the “right” size of a tablet.
Some were adamant that 10″ tablets were too big to cart around all the time and that they might as well take their notebook with them.
Other’s said that 7″ tablets were too small to be useful and they’d rather have a larger display to work with.
A similar discussion started around phones, where’s the line between a phone and a tablet? (This site is a nice way to visualize how big phones have become)
I personally like the 10″ tablets, but I would never carry one with me all the time, even the 7″ tablets are too big for that. Likewise large phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note are really too big to call phones, they’re small tablets. To that extent, they’re too cumbersome to carry with you all the time as well.
A phone like the HTC Titan seems to be as large as you can go and still be able to think of it as a phone that you want to always have on you.
A tablet seems to be useful around the house, or when you are traveling somewhere in a car or plane. In that case, the 10″ tablets seem like a better fit.
Then comes the question of thickness. Many phone manufacture’s have been on a crash diet to get their phones as thin as possible (many under 7mm now), but is that the best way to go? If you could double your battery life at the cost of having a 14mm phone would you?
I know I would, but I don’ want some third party add-on back that looks like some kind of cancerous lump. And finding cases that support non-factory form factors is just about impossible.
Many of the frontier’s of phone design are coming to their logical end points, could we see a major shift in design from how small/fast/resolution to functional/time/quality?