“Where have all the small phones gone?”
“Remember when mini smartphones were actually small?”
“Why do small smartphones have to suck on the spec sheet?”
Those blurbs, taken from two years’ worth of Pocketnow editorial headlines, succinctly illustrate our historic frustration with the smartphone sizing problem. For the past few generations, average device size has skyrocketed: HTC’s HD2 was considered massive when it launched four years ago, with HTC selling it under the slogan “take the big screen with you.” Today, though, its 4.3-inch display seems almost quaint alongside flagships like Samsung’s 5-inch Galaxy S 4 or LG’s 6-inch G Flex. Apple iPhone aside, the smartphone landscape in 2014 is a brutal world of “size matters,” with small phones relegated to the mid-tier and low-end fringes. And that’s a status quo that Sony aims to shake up with the 4.3-inch Xperia Z1 Compact.
