As smartphone technology evolves and competition becomes more intense in that market space, innovations are not only focusing on features but also on phone size. Thus, we now have still another new marketing term β phablet. [Yes, just what we need another new term. π ] A phablet is a combination of a phone and tablet, a full-featured smartphone with a much bigger screen.
Will this trend continue? Will it be successful? Will it slow the growth of tablets?
As Brian X. Chen reports for the New York Times:
βSmartphones are going against one of the long-held rules in portable electronics, that smaller is better. Year by year, computers, storage devices, and music players have shed size and weight. And for decades, it has been happening with cellphones, too. But now cellphones, and smartphones in particular, are going the way of the television: They just keep getting bigger and bigger. And people keep buying them.β
βThe trend became even more apparent this week, as handset makers introduced a number of big-screen smartphones β from five diagonal inches to more than seven inches β at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung Electronics, Sony, and the Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, among others, are all betting that consumers find images and video to be more vivid and engaging on a bigger screen, and that they may prefer to carry a larger phone instead of both a smartphone and a tablet.β
Click on the image to see a video on the phablet.
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