The Day Smartphones Will Stop Getting Bigger

The phones are too damn big.

I’m not a fan of huge phones! They’re awkward to hold, their batteries die too quickly, and they don’t really fit in my pocket. They’re battle in a spec war I didn’t sign up for, but somehow got drafted into.

Samsung is one of the worst huge-phone offenders, what with the Galaxy Note tab-phone thing. At 5.3 inches, its screen is more than two inches larger than Samsung’s first Android phone, which came out in 2009. And the growth seems to be accelerating. When will it end? I don’t know! But I have a theory.

Think about it: What might make the young, tech-savvy, predominantly male customers who love these huge phones a little less eager to jam them into their jeans? What’s the one thing? Ego.

So I plotted screen sizes of the last eight major Samsung Android phones against their release dates, and had Excel draw a linear trend line. I threw in another line indicating the average human penis size according to Andropenis.com (???).

Image by John Herrman

And so there it is: The day the world’s male nerds will start to second-guess their desire for the newest, biggest smartphone. The day something about these phones will start to feel… off to a majority of their users. The Cellphone Penispocalypse. October 2nd, 2012. Mark it.

So, uh, thoughts?