Statistics: Android users were all about phablets this holiday season

It is no secret that smartphones are getting larger. A report published on Medium by analyst Alex Barredo highlights a constant increase in display sizes. Is this something people like? Some wouldn’t says so, but there is a reason for this trend, and at least part of it must be demand.

I, for one, happen to prefer larger smartphones, and it seems many of you would agree with me. At least that is what the latest Flurry report seems to corroborate. According to the Yahoo-owned insights blog, 54% of all Android devices activated between December 19 and 25 were the so-called “phablets”. These are pretty much known as over-sized smartphones.

But I have to wonder what exactly constitutes a “phablet” or large handset? What are the size standards used for this research? Sadly, this is not mentioned in the report, but they do state “small phones” are those 3.5-inches or smaller. Of course, these handsets are nearly extinct, so we are still left in the dark.

Medium Android phones follow phablets as the second highest statistic, with 35% of all activations accounting for these. By the way, things were different on the Apple side. Most iOS activations were for medium phones. We can assume this would be the size of the iPhone 6 and 6S they are talking about… right?

When accounting for all major mobile operating systems, we can see that sizes have been growing year-over-year, taking into account activations during the same periods of time.

And of course, all those shiny new devices will bring a herd of people to the app stores. This means that there will be high app download traffic, something Flurry also caught a glimpse of. It seems app downloads were up by 120%.

We just have to wonder how much phones will continue to grow. They have to stop somewhere, right? Growth can’t continue rising uniformly anymore. I mean, 5.5-6.0 inch devices are pretty normal now. I say we keep it that way.

Did any of you guys get a smartphone for the holidays? How big is it? Hit the comments to let us know.