Mobile Screen Sizes
The latest trend in mobile screen sizes is causing mobile phone manufacturers to make the screen bigger and bigger. A few years back this trend was working in the opposite direction, and screen sizes were getting even smaller. The biggest screen that you will see in a phone today is the 5 inches screen sported by the Dell Streak, which is simply humongous for a mobile phone. In fact, many, people even argue that the Dell Streak is not a mobile phone at all, rather it is a small tablet PC.
The smartphones that are used by people today are mini-computers in their own right, and they are used for a multitude of purposes. Some of these uses which mandatorily require a big screen are watching movies, surfing the web and playing mobile games. The Apple iPhone started the trend of large sized touchscreens with its 3.5 inches screen size, but today it is fair to say this size seems smaller in comparison with some of its rivals.
HTC phones, Samsung mobile phones and Motorola phones are all coming out with models that have a screen size of 4.0 inches and even 4.3 inches, and experts argue that this is the right size for a touchscreen smartphone. A screen bigger than this would make it impossible to use the phone for its standard purpose, telephony and calling. Lower end phones come with a standard size as they are not touchscreens by nature, and their size will never become so big. RIM has stuck to its tradition of reasonably sized screens on its BlackBerry mobile phones, but they too may soon start going bigger. You must remember that the measurement of a screens size is the diagonal length of the screen, so a 5 inches screen would be considerably bigger than a 4 inches screen.
Common Screen Sizes for Mobiles
A recent study showed that consumers are beginning to care lesser about the screen size now, because it is the hardware of the device and the software that it runs that matters most. Personally, I feel that screen size will always be an important factor in a buyers decision-making process. And maybe people are beginning to care less about this because they are taking it for granted that all the big phones have huge screens. Take all the high-end models of HTC and Samsung, and you will find a minimum size of 3.7 inches now, and the 4 inches and higher screens are the real market leaders when it comes to sales.
When a touch screen phone is turned to landscape position, the screen size becomes even more important. This is essential if someone is viewing movies on the phone, or is surfing the web since it makes more data visible without the need for too much page rendering. Buyers for whom these activities are important will naturally look at phones with bigger screens. Some of the biggest screen phones available today are HTC HD7 (4.3 inches), HTC Desire HD (4.3 inches), HTC Evo 4G (4.3 inches), Motorola Droid X (4.3 inches) and Samsung Galaxy S (4.0 inches). Slightly smaller phones are Apple iPhone 4 (3.5 inches), HTC Droid Incredible (3.8 inches), Motorola Droid 2 (3.7 inches) and the Samsung Wave II (3.8 inches).
Connection Between Screen Size and Resolution
Now a lot of people get confused between the resolution of the screen and the size of the screen as well. A higher resolution inadvertently means better picture quality, since this signifies the number of pixels that can be viewed in one inch. Two phones with the same resolution but different screen sizes can display vastly different visuals, since the resolution is stretched for the bigger screen. Thus the phone with the smaller screen will show a better picture quality. This is why the 3.5 inches screen of the iPhone 4 shows the sharpest images, since its resolution is the market leading 640x960. Acer plans to release a phone soon that will beat this resolution, and even the new Android operating system 2.3 (Gingerbread) will get out phones with a resolution of 760x1280 next year. Finding the right balance between the resolution and Android mobile screen sizes is vitally important though. Other common resolutions are as follows.
- QVGA (Quarter Video Graphics Array) - 320x240 pixels
- VGA (Video Graphics Array) - 640x480 pixels
- SVGA (Super Video Graphics Array) - 800x600 pixels
