phablet

iPhone users, I told you so: bigger is better

Old time iPhone users, “I told you so.” If I got a dollar every time an iPhone enthusiast told me a 3.5-inch display is the perfect size, and then of course, a 4-inch display, I’d be beaching in the Maldives by now.

Pocket is seeing huge shifts in usage with the iPhone 6 and especially with the iPhone 6 Plus. iPhone users who had an iPhone 5 or 5S and then got an iPhone 6 Plus read an astonishing 65% more articles on the bigger (and better) phone.

Consuming on the iPhone 6 Plus is so good, iPhone users are using their iPads dramatically less. With the puny iPhone 5S, people consumed 55% of the time on the iPhone and 45% on the iPad. Then those same people upgraded, and now they consume 80% of the time on the iPhone 6 Plus and only 20% on the iPad. With a phablet, there is much less need for a tablet.

iPhone 6 users also saw a similar usage bump, just in smaller amounts relative to its superior sibling.

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Brother vs. brother: iPhone 6 winning, but only because of supply

I first prognosticated that the iPhone 6 Plus would outsell the iPhone 6. A week later, I wrote that the forecast was likely going to be wrong.

A report from Consumer Intelligence Partners suggests that for every one iPhone 6 Plus, Apple is selling three times the number of iPhone 6s. It’s unclear whether that’s due to demand, but it’s at least due to supply.

As I wrote before:

The Wall Street Journal reported an unnamed source as saying:

We have been churning out 140,000 iPhone 6 Plus and 400,000 iPhone 6 every day, the highest daily output ever, but the volume is still not enough to meet the preorders.

Foxconn is making nearly 3x many more iPhone 6s than iPhone 6 Pluses, everyday. Given that, it’ll be awfully hard for the iPhone 6 Plus to outsell the iPhone 6.

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Phablets hard to use with one hand? Blame software not hardware

I was reading on Mashable how most are happy with their iPhone 6 Plus, a few are undecided, and a few returned it for the 6 — usually after only a day of use. That’s interesting because many who are happy with the 6 Plus needed a week or two to get used to it. Once they did, they loved it. That too was my experience with the OnePlus One.

The biggest reason for not liking the 6 Plus is that it wasn’t ideal for one handed use. Which I find fascinating, because the reason for that is not hardware — i.e. size per se — but software.

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Breaking Apple cognitive dissonance

It’s fascinating to read tech pundits around the web rationalize their cognitive dissonance in declaring the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen size as perfect once upon a time, backtracking to 4-inches, and now praising something larger.

The most influential opinion on this seems to be Marco Arment, who explained away the logical inconsistency by characterizing phablets in 2011 as mediocre. That Apple fans confused execution with concept, that it required Apple’s flawless execution — possible only today — to reveal the concept’s true value.

It’s an interesting theory…except it’s totally wrong.

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Media finally catching on: phablets make mini tablets obsolete

If you purchased a 5.5-inch smartphone today and don’t own anything else, the next device you buy simply won’t be a mini tablet. That money is better spent on other things, like a laptop or larger tablet. That’s why I believe the future of mini tablets is niche, and why larger tablets and laptops will ultimately converge.

That 5.5-inch device is good enough to be your daily device for personal consumption: browsing the web, reading books and even watching video. It’s still great for phone calls, photos and messages too. If you purchase a second device, it’ll be to do things you can’t do well on a 5.5-inch screen — like office work.

Despite most of Asia being clued into this for the past couple years, and despite large Android phones actually being popular in the US and Europe, the press there seemed largely unaware of this trend.

Until the iPhone 6 Plus.

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Super phablets are a major trend in Asia

Just a scant few days ago, I wrote about how the 7-inch mini tablet might go the way of the dodo bird, and a scant few days later, I may have to eat my words. According to a report from the IDC:

Large smartphones (otherwise known as phablets), are already a growing trend in Asia, having outshipped notebooks and tablets last year.  But IDC finds that now even larger devices, tablets of 7” screen sizes and above, are increasingly shipping with cellular voice capabilities, and such devices are getting more traction in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) region, breaching the 25% mark in the second quarter of 2014. . .This translates to more than 60% growth on a year-on-year basis in unit terms for this category of tablets, which also incidentally happen to be 100% Android-based.

The report also goes on to state that 50% of 7-inch and up tablets shipped in India and Indonesia have cellular voice capabilities. I travel to Indonesia a lot and so find that nugget fascinating, as I don’t recall ever having seen a person call with a tablet. They probably do via a headset.

I can believe this trend happening for a number of reasons: cost, perception that more is better, traffic and handbags.

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