iPhone 6: Big is best. Or is it?

There has been a lot of hype in the last week ago with the release of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Are they better than what came before them? Are they different enough? Are the new features groundbreaking? Are they worth queing in line for?

Besides the desire to always get the next phone, I don’t see the appeal. And my reasoning is very simple; they are too big!

At one point phones got smaller and smaller. Before smartphones and touch screens, the smaller your phone was, the cooler it was. The better it was. The more expensive it was. Going from the ever reliable Alcatel that could have been mistaken for an actual brick, to those small Nokia’s that came in so many different colours that everyone had to have; if you had a big phone, your phone wasn’t cool and neither were you.

Then touchscreens came out and phone’s got a bit bigger again. The touchscreen had to be functional. You needed to be able to read what you were doing. Then tablets came and we had the best of both worlds. When iPhones came, it was mastered. The perfect size was the iPhone 4. Nice and solid, but still palm sized. You could still hold it in one hand or slip it in your back pocket.

When 5s came out, they were slimmer but the screen size was the same. I thought they were weird at first; its lightness and slimness to me made them feel less expensive. But you got used to that.

Then Android started coming out with popular alternatives to the iPhone. I never liked them because they were so darn big. People would say “but look how much larger my screen is” and all I could say is “surely that’s a bad thing, right?”.

Apparently not. Now that the 6 is here, it looks as though screen size momentum is going back the other way; to the oversized. Big is good. I find it hard to believe. They look like Kindles, and I have a Kindle, I don’t need my phone to look like a Kindle.

For women (and some men perhaps), do we need to get bigger purses to fit these monstrosities? Do people need bigger pockets?

I’m guessing all the sparkly new features make the 6 wonderful. Higher screen resolution and a better camera and all those things definitely make me want to upgrade. But I like my little phone.

I wonder what size phones will reach until the shift changes again, and we have to get used to our TV-sized mobile phones getting smaller to the point of not being able to see them.