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Tall screens are BAD marketing gimmicks.

ultravegeta1981 said:
It was actually Apple with the iPhone 5.
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Indeed. The iPhone 5 "commercial"/trailer had Jony Ive saying something like "by making the iPhone taller, but not wider (...) you can still comfortably use it with one hand."
The iPhone 5 had the same (body and screen) width as the iPhone 4(S), but the screen went from 3:2 to 16:9.
In fact, it seems that back then the iPhone 5 was parodied by predicting the future of iPhone to be ever taller iPhones. ("iPhone 5, the tallest iPhone since iPhone"; "iPhone 10: the tallest iPhone yet". Do a Google image search for various parodies)

iPhone-5-Tall.jpg


Then, the iPhone 6 commercial said something about making the screen taller /and/ wider.
The proportions were kept 16:9. But ever since, Apple has only left us the options of "Big and Bigger" (as Apple themselves called the 6 and the 6+). I suppose they didn't care much anymore about the idea of comfortable one-handed use?

oplix said:
The real innovation would have been to make a bezelless 16:9 phone.
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Yes. I thought that the iPhone of the future would've looked as if you have the iPhone Plus body and then chisel away pretty much everything that isn't screen.
 
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Mlrollin91 said:
I feel like a broken record. The OP claimed tall screens that ARE NOT 16:9 are a gimmick. The iPhone 5 is 16:9.
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OP implies 16:9 is perfect. Yet a tall 16:9 (the iPhone 5) was labeled a gimmick and imperfect. That’s the point.
 
Wholeheartedly agree with OP. Only a matter of time until someone makes a 21:9 abomination which will be touted as the best screen ever. These tall phones + tall screens are getting out of hand. I hate 18:9 screens on phones as much as I hate 16:9 screens on laptops (16:10, 4:3, 3:2 FTW).
 
i agree. it's marketing (5.8" > 5.5"). In truth a taller screen after a certain point adds very little utility.

the truth is, its easier for you to scroll down using your finger to read, than it is for your eyes to go all the way down to the bottom of the phone. your eyes stay on a relatively constant vertical zone when reading on a phone. it's not practical nor is it realistic for you to ever use the bottom most part of your screen to read a line on an article.

it's dead space - you will rarely focus your eyes on it, and it is actually very difficult for your fingers to interact with it (instead it is a zone you have to avoid in order to not trigger unintended actions)

the tall screen on the other hand takes away:
1. battery life
2. usability (one hand use, no bezels to rest your finger on)
3. space (no headphone jack!)

not sure the tradeoffs are worth it.

Width matters more than height after a certain point (you fit more words in the same line, or vertical zone). Which is why the 5.5" 8 plus screen I think is a more practical aspect ratio for a larger screen size.
 
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oplix said:
Tall screens that are not 16:9 are straight gimmicks. It’s Samsung that thought - how do we innovate screen size without making the phone wider? Then everyone else followed . There is really nothing great about tall screens. About 0.00001% of web content is designed for portrait.

Tall screens exist strictly as a marketing gimmick to advertise bigger screen size in a thinner phone.

This fad/phase of tall screens is supposed to get people reinvigorated about buying smartphones which have been largely unchanged for years now. Once this feature is normalized throughout the industry, marketing will come up with a new gimmick.

The real innovation would have been to make a bezelless 16:9 phone. Unfortunately, this is all preplanned based on marketing. The consumer will have to suffer at least several years of these useless designs before they “fix” it and start selling bezelless 16:9 phones.
Click to expand...

I’m sorry, but Samsung didn’t invent wider aspect ratios. They have existed for a much longer time before Samsung or others have began making the devices in a wider aspect ratio (as early as the 1950’s)
 
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One thing I always appreciated about MacBooks was that they resisted the urge to go to 16:9 and settled on 16:10 - though the new surface books go even better with their 3:2... squarer aspect ratios are much better with computers and tablets - don’t honestly care all that much with phones though, I like a bigger screen size but at the end of the day I don’t use it for extended browsing sessions or other areas where extra screen space is welcome.
 
flat five said:
thats what i thought too.

but it's also what's going to happen if doing a bezel free rectangle.. so..
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Not with rounded corners and edges. I mean, if the iPhone X had the 4mm bezel all the way around without the notch, we wouldn't be calling it a picture frame.
 
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Cryates said:
Not with rounded corners and edges. I mean, if the iPhone X had the 4mm bezel all the way around without the notch, we wouldn't be calling it a picture frame.
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rectangles don’t have round corners though.

so you’re thinking no bezels, fillet corners, no notch, but still front facing cameras?
 
oplix said:
Tall screens that are not 16:9 are straight gimmicks. It’s Samsung that thought - how do we innovate screen size without making the phone wider? Then everyone else followed . There is really nothing great about tall screens. About 0.00001% of web content is designed for portrait.

Tall screens exist strictly as a marketing gimmick to advertise bigger screen size in a thinner phone.

This fad/phase of tall screens is supposed to get people reinvigorated about buying smartphones which have been largely unchanged for years now. Once this feature is normalized throughout the industry, marketing will come up with a new gimmick.

The real innovation would have been to make a bezelless 16:9 phone. Unfortunately, this is all preplanned based on marketing. The consumer will have to suffer at least several years of these useless designs before they “fix” it and start selling bezelless 16:9 phones.
Click to expand...
Actually for a smartphone a 2:1 ratio is the intelligent design and is not a gimmick. You see more content in 99% of usage.

Imagine if the iPhone 7, 4.7” remained 4.7” but just lost the top and bottom bezels and remained 16:9. Okay, that could happen, but use critical thinking to determine the consequences of this. If they did that, then the device would have to get much smaller physically, which means it would need extremely profound innovations in internal component sizes and/or it would greatly reduce the quality of certain components. So what if they did the opposite and went to 5.8” at 16:9. Well, then you are holding an unintelligently designed device, because it is now much much too wide for a smartphone (like the iPhone Plus). So the only other option is to go to about a 5.0” 16:9 so the width doesn’t increase too much, and in doing that you then still reduce the physical size greatly which inhibits internal components.

The reason 2:1 makes sense in a smartphone is because a smartphone is a device that is designed for two things: held in a single hand and slid into a pocket. This means it MUST be inherently narrow. Now, like I said you could do a 16:9, but that greatly limits the size of the display you can use and therefore you will in fact lose content you could otherwise have displayed.

The caveat is that most developers including Apple will be too stupid to use the extra height intelligently. They’ll simply show more content in the vertical plane instead of placing new elements that otherwise couldn’t have fit on the display. This is a waste because you could have easily scrolled to this content instantly... you don’t even scan an entire page before scrolling, you will almost always read while scrolling slowly.
 
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Three things about a phone's screen shape that one should care about:
1. Can you interact with a website or an app with one hand?
2. Can you fit it into a super convenient place (like a pocket) ?
3. Can the screen show the stuff that you are interested in?

Kind of hard to test those things without access to lots and lots of working models, but no one claimed that product engineering is easy.

Everything else (including so-called objective criteria) is, at best, marketing drivel.
 
andyw715 said:
If 16:9 was perfect then every movie would be shot in 16:9, they aren't.
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fwiw, 16:9 came to be as it basically was an average of all the widely used aspect ratios in the 80s :

wiki:

Dr. Kerns H. Powers, a member of the SMPTE Working Group on High-Definition Electronic Production, first proposed the 16:9 (1.77:1) aspect ratio at a time[when?] when nobody was creating 16:9 videos. The popular choices in 1980 were: 1.33:1 (based on television standard's ratio at the time), 1.66:1 (the European "flat" ratio), 1.85:1 (the American "flat" ratio), 2.20:1 (the ratio of 70 mm films and Panavision) and 2.39:1 (the CinemaScope ratio for anamorphicwidescreen films).

Powers cut out rectangles with equal areas, shaped to match each of the popular aspect ratios. When overlapped with their center points aligned, he found that all of those aspect ratio rectangles fit within an outer rectangle with an aspect ratio of 1.77:1 and all of them also covered a smaller common inner rectangle with the same aspect ratio 1.77:1.[1] The value found by Powers is exactly the geometric mean of the extreme aspect ratios, 4:3 (1.33:1) and 2.35:1 (or 64:27, see also 21:9 aspect ratio for more information), √47/15 ≈ 1.770 which is coincidentally close to 16:9 (1.77:1). Applying the same geometric mean technique to 16:9 and 4:3 yields the 14:9 aspect ratio, which is likewise used as a compromise between these ratios.
​

..but yeah, it's nothing to do with what looked best or what provided optimum viewing of content.. unless by optimum, you mean a ratio for cropping that shows the most amount of average content between all of the other more optimized ratios..
it was a digital compromise
(not that i'm using 'compromise' as a negative there.. 'compromise' can be positive too)




1361px-Dr._Kerns_Powers,_SMPTE_derivation_of_16-9_aspect_ratio.svg.png





the more recent proposal for a compromising solution with modern content consumption is 18:9 (or 2:1)..
this proposal is attempting to have movies shot natively at 18:9 which is wider than U.S widescreen standard of 1.85:1.. it's wider than 16:9... but narrower than 2.35:1 cinematic..
likewise, it's attempting to have video/TV shot at this ratio too..

16:9 was meant as crop ratio standard.. how to crop the other formats with a common crop..
18:9 is meant as a shooting ratio standard.. how to shoot and present without cropping.. it aims to have less wide movies and wider video.. that's the compromise it's aiming for.

we'll see if it catches on but so far, some modern shows have started using the ratio and, of course, these latest phones are doing it as well.. so it's more than just some hypothetical solution.. we are seeing it being adopted by some of the major players.
 
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