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Comment by marquis | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I want this phone but it's huge. Please google, someone - make a decent phone that's not the size of a giant's thumb. I guess they've done their focus groups and their whatevers and decided that people want more screensize but please for the love of god make a small awesome Android phone for a girl's hands and purse and european small-sized car with a tiny dashboard (because I use mine for GPS every-single-day) and I don't even care if you shove pinterest and facebook on the frontscreen (I'll root it and make it go away, I promise).

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I'm in the same camp. I caved and got a 4.3" Sony phone -- the smallest one I could find that still did 720p --, because it was fairly affordable. Sure, I like the increased space on the screen, but it feels very clumsy compared to my previous 3.7" device. And I've had it long enough now that it's not getting much better through experience. My focus on a high screen resolution may have been misguided.

Totally agree. I bought a Galaxy S3 recently and my only major regret is that the thing is freakin' huge. I don't understand at all why this is desirable. Even in the rare instance where I want to watch a video on my phone, the slightly large screen doesn't really noticeably improve the experience.

The killer use case for large screens: make sure you're using Google Chrome as your browser. Then select "request desktop site".

How about someone invents a flip-out screen already? Then I can have a slim touch-phone and 1080p screen for those rare times I want to use a browser when I'm away from my laptop.

We could use robotic pixels, to flip around when you need them on the edges (it would also mean you could embed a camera in the middle of a screen for better eye-communication)

Sure, that's nice enough but I doubt it's a make or break for many people. Having a phone that fits comfortably in my pocket is a much bigger deal.

Anyway, I think it would be a lot more interesting to use that bigger form factor to give a phone amazing battery life or to make it super rugged.

my top two uses for my smartphone are as an ebook reader and to browse the web. large screens are superb for both of those.

Well, if you don't care as much about portability, I think an iPad is far superior at both of those tasks than any smartphone I've encountered.

An iPad doesn't fit in your jeans pocket.

my galaxy nexus is perfectly portable.

Totally agree with you! All of the high spec Android phones pretty much require two hands to use. There are some Android phones that I can hold in one hand but the specs on them make it unbearable to use. My hope is that the release a google Nexus 3. 10/10 would buy.

I am of the opposite opinion, I have had the Note one for almost a year and idk if i can downgrade in size! If it was not for that and a little the lack of expandable storage, i would be all over this phone. Looks truly amazing.

The Galaxy S3 Mini looks pretty nice to me: http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s3-mini/4...

The perfect phone for me would probably have a 480x800 screen using the regular S3's 306ppi glass.

The S3 mini is more S1/S2 than S3 though. May as well get one of those.

Amusingly the GS3 Mini has exactly the same screen specs as the original Galaxy S did. I'm wondering if they still had a warehouse full of these they needed to ship...

If this can run my GPS app NDrive nicely (you can't use Google Navigation when you're in the middle of the Brazilian jungle or wherever) I think you've found the current winner.

Though CNet review sounded gloomy, as if it were "here's what would have been a really nice phone in 2008" but if that's what I have to give up for a small phone that can run a few important apps I'm happy.

Looks like it's already available but maybe it's just not worth the price for what you get and I should get a bigger purse, and get really good at holding a phone with one hand while pointing with the other. http://www.mobilekiwi.co.nz/android/item/1694-samsung-galaxy...

He quotes from another source: ""Apple has proven quite conclusively that tens of millions of people are happy to have a device they can wrap their hands around. It doesn't mean they don't want powerful processors or high megapixel cameras."

I have to wonder with all the tablet sizes whether we're in a period where the manufacturers have no stinking idea what people want.

Or people are different enough that there's a market for pretty much any size.

I wouldn't have such a hard time believing that if there were more small phones.

That's where I think we're headed. Just looking at Apple's product line alone for simplicity, take a look at how much the new iMac looks like an iPad on a stand:

http://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/2949/as-images.apple....

From the iPod Nano to iPhone 4S to iPhone 5 to iPad Mini to iPad to 11" Air to 13" Air to 21" iMac to 27" iMac, doesn't it seem like we're headed to a world where a computer is a thin display panel of arbitrary size with some electronics hidden behind it? And it won't make sense to think of them all as fundamentally different products any more than we think of, say, small pads of paper and large pads of paper as fundamentally different products.

I was freaked out the first time I saw that iMac photo, but as it turns out the angle at which it was taken is...highly optimized.

The difference between the Apple product line and the (Android) phone marketplace is that Apple hasn't stopped making the iPod Nano, likewise the paper industry didn't stop making small pads of paper when Trapper Keepers became more popular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&feature=yout...

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