![]() ![]() The premium nature of iPhones managed to buck the "cost per square inch" vis a vis Android, with the iPhone 6/7/8 being classy best-sellers despite being smaller than competitors. Samsung told me long ago that the large-phone trend was originally driven by female consumers, because they kept their phones in purses rather than pockets. ![]() A few years ago, an Android OEM CEO told me off the record that US consumers pay for tech by the square inch: they just aren't willing to pay a high price for something that's smaller than something less expensive.Īnd analysts have told me there's no actual rush of women buying smaller phones. Remember that the SE used old parts to achieve a profit on a lower-than-usual price for Apple. The iPhone SE, meanwhile, never got an upgrade. Popular Phones by Width (Narrowest to Widest)įor years now, Sony has made a pretty good "compact" line of Android phones, but US carriers have snubbed them. If you need a truly one-handed iPhone and your hands aren't very big, the iPhone 8 will be your choice this year. The iPhone 7 and 8 are staying on sale, for reasonable prices, too. I included the Galaxy S9 on this chart because it's the narrowest other popular flagship phone out there it now carries the torch for the iPhone 6/7/8-like size, although notice that it's also taller. If you're sensitive to phone width, that puts you in a tough position. The iPhone XR is even wider, almost the width of a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. The iPhone XS is 0.14 inches wider than the iPhone 6/7/8, and 0.48 inches wider than the iPhone SE (RIP). That's because the XS Max gets rid of the 8 Plus's ridiculously giant 2014-era bezels.īut if you have an older non-Plus iPhone, any of the new models will be potential hand-busters. There's good news for people who like big phones: the iPhone XS Max, with its 6.5-inch screen, is actually narrower than the iPhone 8 Plus ($699.99 at T-Mobile) (Opens in a new window). That puts those who want one-handed phones in a bind, though, because very few high-end phones are that narrow anymore. I'd say it's more like 2.65 or 2.7 inches for people with smaller hands, especially women. When judging whether a phone will fit in your hand, in my experience the most important number is the phone's width: that tells you whether it will fit into your palm and whether your thumb can work its way across the screen.Ī long time ago, LG did a study and found that many people get less comfortable using a phone one-handed when it's wider than 2.8 inches. It's a little misleading to look at screen sizes when trying to judge the size of phones now, because phones have different aspect ratios: some are taller and narrower, so they fit a longer diagonal screen size into less space. But as you shop for your new iPhone XS, XS Max or XR, it's good to understand just how big these phones really are. Small phones are dead, and some Apple users are in mourning.
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