Enormous smartphones are taking over

The Yahoo-owned analytics site Flurry has a lot of data on the types of mobile devices people are using to get online. And it shows a huge trend toward larger and larger smartphones:

Phones and computers used to be very different devices, and until recently everyone expected smartphones and tablets to be separate categories, as well. Steve Jobs used to say that no one would want to buy an enormous smartphone.

But he was wrong. In recent years, Android vendors started building larger and larger smartphones, and consumers bought them in droves. Then Apple's new, larger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were huge hits. As this chart shows, the share of smartphones with screens larger than 5 inches grew from 3 percent in 2013 to 20 percent today. At the same time, smartphones smaller than 3.5 inches declined from 7 percent to 2 percent of the market.

It turns out lots of people want "phablets" that straddle the line between smartphones and tablets. It's just taken vendors a few years to realize it.

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