Are Phones And Tablets Becoming The Same Device?

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Glance around your office, dorm or local coffee shop, and you'll probably see a handful of giant smartphones—five- to six-inch ‘phablets' that practically didn't exist just five years ago. The 5.5-inch Apple Inc. AAPL iPhone 6 and 6-inch Nexus 6 are just two recent examples of premium devices embracing the ‘bigger is better' mantra.

It sure seems like phones are getting bigger every year.

For tablets, some might guess that the opposite is true. Where we once only used 10-inch iPads, we now tend to see smaller gadgets, like the 8-inch Galaxy Tabs, 7.8-inch iPad Minis, or even 6-inch Kindle Paperwhites.

Are tablets getting smaller?

And more importantly, are we converging on the same device?

In order to test our hypotheses, we went to the data. While we don't have raw sales numbers, we can look at the size of every US-based phone and tablet released over the last five years. The data comes from our own smartphones and tablets topics, where we've curated a near-comprehensive list of devices since 2010.

To answer our question about how device sizes are changing, we categorized both phones and tablets into three size categories: small, medium and large.

For phones, we assumed anything with a screen size under 4.5 inches was small, anything between 4.5 and 5.2 was medium, and anything over 5.2 was large. For tablets, our ranges were below 9 inches, between 9 and 11 inches, and over 11 inches.

Here's what we found:

As we might expect, the trend is quite clear for phones. Small handsets are disappearing, while large ‘phablets' are becoming much more common. While we don't know for sure whether the trend will continue, early signals indicate that the market could be split practically 50/50 between ‘medium' and ‘large' phones in 2015.

The trend for tablets is a little less clear. The data suggests that tablets are indeed getting smaller, but at least in 2014, we've seen a small resurgence of large tablets.

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Our best guess is that the premium, “laptop-replacement” tablets are creating a new market segment—a category popularized by the Microsoft Corporation MSFT Surface and validated by the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2. Rumor has it Apple may jump on board next year with a 12-inch-plus iPad Pro.

Giant tablets aside, the rest of the data indicates that manufacturers are moving toward smaller tablets—typically, seven- to nine-inch leisure devices for quick photo-viewing and book-reading. Which got us wondering: maybe the six-, seven-, or eight-inch product is really where we've been headed all along. With the smartphone rapidly becoming the world's most popular computer (ex: billions of people own a smartphone, while only millions own a laptop), perhaps the phone-tablet hybrid is the ideal size for a personal device.

We'll be curious to see if the trend holds in 2015. Stay tuned.

 

The post Are Phones and Tablets Becoming the Same Device? appeared first on FindTheBest: The Official Blog.

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Posted In: TechPhone size over timeTablet size over time
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