Did you? He also said "the software benefits that come from that extra half an inch hugely improve the experience of using the phone." That's certainly praise, possibly even glowing.
The criticism here seems reasonable. He went from discussing a "huge downside of larger screens" to saying that a bigger screen "hugely" improves the experience. Oh, and previously the smaller screen was "one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products." Manufacturers with larger screens were "doing it wrong."
The entire post is just Dustin Curtis trying to rationalize his jump from claiming that bigger screens are too big to claiming that they are a huge improvement (now that Apple does them).
He said "many", not "all", and "4-inch+", not "4-inch".
Most of the high-end Android phones on the market are larger than 4 inches (in many cases, significantly so), and he says the iPhone 5 - at 4.0 - is barely acceptable.
The problem people had with the original article was the smugness with which he made the argument. Here's the worst part (from the 3.5 article):
> This is an example of one of those design decisions that you don't usually notice until you see someone doing it wrong. It's one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products.
It's one thing to lay out an argument for a design, it's another to claim that anyone arriving at another conclusion (as Apple eventually did), is "doing it wrong".
The criticism here seems reasonable. He went from discussing a "huge downside of larger screens" to saying that a bigger screen "hugely" improves the experience. Oh, and previously the smaller screen was "one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products." Manufacturers with larger screens were "doing it wrong."
The entire post is just Dustin Curtis trying to rationalize his jump from claiming that bigger screens are too big to claiming that they are a huge improvement (now that Apple does them).