The Android phone industry just hands out one oversized Android phone after another.
Let's look at these big phones.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4G, 135 x 67.9mm with 1280x800 pixels (aspect ratio 8:5)
Samsung Galaxy SII 125.3 x 66.1mm with 800x480 pixels (aspect ratio 5:3)
HTC EVO 3D 126.1 x 65.4mm with 960x540 pixels (aspect ratio 16:9)
And Samsung Galaxy Note trumps all of them at 146.9 x 9.7 mm with 1280x800 pixels.
(For reference, iPhone 4S 115.2 x 58.6 mm with 960x640 pixels)
I don't understand why all the obsessions with a gigantic screen on a phone. Without a big hand, one can hardly wrap his/her thumb around to touch the right spot on the screen with one hand. A purse or bag is required to carried it around. Putting it in a pocket is possible but it takes away too much precious real estate of a pocket. And a big screen burns battery much too fast.
Another problem is the aspect ratio of the screen. It already presents a design challenge for me when designing a universal game for both iPhone (3:2) and iPad (4:3). But I can make an excuse between a phone and a tablet. Stretching images into a different aspect ratio does not make it picture perfect. The other choice is to fill un-used space with background color or image. There are many blogs and articles discussing techniques dealing with this issue. But none has talked about how to test and see the user interface on different screens without buying all of them.
Bigger screens will not make those products more appealing to consumers, when human factors are taken out of product design. I also wonder whether Samsung and HTC care to tend Android application and game developers. The two leading Android brands behave like pure hardware manufacturers that don't seem to appreciate the importance of consistency to the ecosystem which adds value to Android phones. At the same time, I heard it is the carriers who drive product specifications. Well, carriers have never had a love for third party developers.
