Closed Poll: What is your preferred screen size?

Continuing the discussion from Screen size bigger and FP2 wishlist.

What is your preferred screen size?

  • smaller than 4.3" (like e.g. the iPhone 5)
  • 4.3" (like the Fairphone 1 / 1U)
  • about 4.7" (like e.g. the iPhone 6)
  • about 5.1" (like e.g. the Samsung Galaxy S5)
  • bigger than 5.1" (so called phablet, like e.g. the iPhone 6 Plus)

0 voters

4 Likes

My favorite is missing: 4.5inch like the Moto E. But i guess there are enough options already.

After some thinking i decided for 4.7inch. This seems huge but i guess they could strip away a bit of the current FP1 bezels, especially on top and bottom, given that there is no need for dedicated-buttons anymore (Android has made the switch to software buttons a while ago, Sailfish and Ubuntu do not use these at all. And i am sure Firefox also works with soft-buttons).

I also think hard buttons are not needed anymore and are also an obstacle for alternative OSes. I hope that the FP2 uses its front side better and skips more of the black rim.

Motorola Moto G, perfect size.

I’ve had two 4.3" phones (HTC Sensation and FP1) and I think it’s perfect. I wouldn’t mind a 4.5" screen if the phone body itself wasn’t much bigger but I don’t think I’d go any bigger than that.

3 Likes

Would you mind telling us what size that is? :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I don’t understand why screen are getting bigger and bigger. For media content? or because of average aging of population :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

For me, FP1/1U is big enough ! I would prefer a smaller screen, with smaller icons (higher resolution). :blush:
Maybe because my eyes are not breaking down or maybe just to go the fairphone way, instead of following the contaminator trend :neutral_face:

2 Likes

Yep!! It’s 5 perfect inches!

1 Like

Two things:

  1. Why do I see a “close poll” button? I suppose I don’t want to close the whole poll, will I?
  2. I think the question is a little bit misleading, since the overall size of the phone can be larger than the screen. It is, in any case, for the FP1(U). If I add a bezel and the usual “dead” space for camera, speaker etc., and a case to the 4.7" inches (or 12 cm, diagonally), then you quite quickly arrive at a size I don’t want to carry around. Especially, if it’s not as slim as the iPhone.

And yes, I agree, 11.43 cm would be perfect for most stuff. :smile:

  1. Maybe because you are user access level 3?
  2. We are talking about the screen here, but I see what you mean. I still think though, that most people define a phone not with its overall size, but with its display size.

I’m one of the fewish people who use more than one phone regularly (different test phones, as it happens). The poll option I wanted to select was “the biggest screen you can fit into a 59mm wide phone”. Or perhaps 60 or 61mm, but definitely not 70mm.

A bigger screen is better, but when I reach for a phone from the pile, I often find myself reaching for the phone that fits comfortably into the hand even though it’s the one with the slowest CPU and worst-quality display.

It’s a pity that so few phones fit the hand these days. Single-handed phone use seems to be a thing of the past.

5 Likes

Well, maybe in some (near?) future displays could be “one way transparent” so this devices could go under the active screen area reducing the dead area… :stuck_out_tongue:

The speaker and buttons only add to the height of the phone, which isn’t critical. A few mm extra width makes a phone fit in fewer people’s hands, but a few mm extra height doesn’t make such a difference.

The ideal phone is wide enough for a forty-character line of text, narrow enough for a hand, light enough to carry, small enough for a pocket, looks gorgeous and has a battery large enough for… whatever.

I wonder whether the reaon reason the phablets are taking over is that forty characters of readable text will not really fit in one hand (particularly when the UIs are designed for the Nexus 6 and 7).

1 Like

If it is possible to connect a HDMI/DisplayPort-Screen, 3,5"-4" is enough for me, otherwise it shouldn’t be smaller than it is currently.

1 Like

I hesitated between 5.1 and bigger, then chose 5.1. It’s not that I love big phones, but large phones can embed large batteries. And I love large batteries.

1 Like

@Freedim: WIW, screens use a lot of power, and use power proportional to their size, so if you increase the width/height, the increased screen area consumes the extra battery capacity (actually that’s not entirely true but I’ll skip the footnotes). What you want is a thick phone, that’s the dimension that lets the battery grow and not the screen.

2 Likes

It is untrue, mainly for two reasons.

  1. Imagine a device with a 2000 mAh battery, where the screen consumes 1000 mAh in 24 hours and the other activities also consume 1000 mAh per 24 hour. In exactly 24 hour, your battery will be empty. Now if you double the screen size and the battery, your screen will consume 2000 mAh in 24 hours, but the other activities have still consumed 1000 mAh. So, at the end of the 24 hours, you will still have 1000 mAh remaining (in this case, if you do the maths, it means 8 hours more, or +33 %). It all depends on the rate between consumption per pixel and comsumption by other activities. And fortunately, my example of a screen consuming 1000-2000 mAh is pessimistic. In practice, the gain is even more relevant, which is empirically confirmed by Samsung Note 4 having nearly 3 days of battery life despite a poor power management and a hungry user interface (TouchWiz).
  2. Doubling the screen size actually allows to do much more than doubling the battery size, since there is a large (and constant) space allocated to the mainboard, camera, USB chip etc. For example, between a 4,5 inches screen and a 6 inches screen phone from the same brand (say Samsung), the battery is almost doubled (though having the same thickness).

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind a (slightly) thicker phone too, if the battery life is significantly increased! :slight_smile:

The first big/small Samsung phones I could think of were the note3 and the s4 mini, so I looked them up. A reality check is always nice to have.

Both from mid-2013 and both 8.x mm thick, so comparable. The note3 has a 3200mAh battery and a 5.7" screen, the s4 mini has a 1900mAh battery and a 4.3" screen. This means that going from 4.3" to 5.7" Samsung added 80% power drain from the screen (90cm² vs. 50cm²) and 70% battery capacity.

Which still means there is more capacity. Given that the other components to not increase power drain and not 100% of power drain comes from the screen (for me it is about 50%).

1 Like

You took the perfect example! In 2014, two of my close relatives had those phones. My girlfriend’s Note 3 would wait 2 days before needing to be charged, whereas my flatmate’s S4 mini would need to be charged every night (they had pretty much the same use of the phone). And that perfectly makes sense:

On the Note 3, the typical screen consumption was 20 mAh per hour (depending on the phone use, of course), and the typical other activities consumption was 60 mAh per hour. The phone consumed 20 + 60 = 80 mAh per hour. So the 3200 mAh battery had juice for 3200 / 80 = 40 hours (from 8 am till midnight the next day).

In the S4 Mini, the screen consumption was 20 * 50 / 90 = 11 mAh per hour and the typical other activities consumption was still 60 mAh per hour. The phone consumed 11 + 60 = 71 mAh per hour. So the 1900 mAh battery had juice for 1900 / 71 = 26 hours.

The calculus mistake you make is implicitly assuming that the screen is the only energy consumer. If it was the case, increasing the screen size and the battery size by the same rate would indeed be pointless.