[jdietrich]

There has been a drastic increase in how much people use their phones. according to a 2017 study by comScore, the average American adult spends 2 hours and 51 minutes per day using their phone. Other research has returned even higher numbers; a large proportion of people spend more than a quarter of their waking hours looking at their phone.

Given such heavy use, it makes sense to use the biggest practical screen. There's a reason why books aren't the size of an index card. Screen sizes in the west have historically lagged behind middle-income markets, where smartphones leapfrogged laptops as the primary computing device for most users. Indian and Chinese customers were demanding 6" 'phablets' at a time when most manufacturers were ambivalent about breaking the 5" barrier. A 6" device is roughly the upper limit for average female hands and average trouser pockets, making it a natural point of convergence.

An iPhone SE has a screen area of 44.1cm². A phone with a 6" 16:9 display has a screen area of 99.2cm². That's still tiny compared to a paperback book (~195.8cm²), but it's pretty much the sweet spot.

https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-thei...