That blog post is horrible. I did this when it first hit, and I'll do it again:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6857506/3.5in.png

Purple is the Galaxy SII circle. Orange is the iPhone circle.

Apparently the iPhone gives you magically larger hands for your smaller device. The confirmation bias is so thick it hurts.

Yeah I just figured that it wasn't to scale... Looking on http://phone-size.com it seems like it is to scale. So that diagram is clearly biased and hurts his argument, but I think that what he says is still valid.

I don't see any advantage to having a bigger screen. Especially when the bigger screen has less pixels (i.e. Galaxy S II). In that case, you actually have less pixel space for UI elements, text, video, etc. than you would with the smaller, denser screen.

Everytime I see this article mentioned, I cringe. I am a man with relatively small hands and I can reach the right edge and even the upper right corner of my Motorola Atrix 2 (almost as big as a Galaxy S II) easily. Have you actually tried this? Unless he has tiny, child-like hands, those graphics have to be inaccurate.

I certainly have no small hands and I can reach the upper corner – but it's so uncomfortable that it hurts.

Reaching and comfortably reaching are different.

I can comfortably reach the upper right corner of my phone. Maybe I have larger hands than I think I do, or maybe I hold my phone differently than most people. But I still don't see how that blog post linked to in the parent comment is at all accurate.

It was also criticized for not having a physical keyboard. The smartphone world has changed tremendously.

There are still quite a few Android phones out there with keyboards. I miss my BB keyboard on occasion, but I can usually just wait till I get to a proper computer if I want to type anything particularly lengthy.

I want an Android phone with keyboard - I like the slider phones, and I'd like an Android equivalent of the Blackberry Torch.

I looked into the Galaxy Pro (http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_pro_b7510-3850.php) , but it looks like a bad compromise.

Sure. My point is simply that when the iPhone came out, it was widely criticized for not having a keyboard. These days, not having a keyboard is the norm, and those few phones which still have them are really unusual. What was once a target for criticism is now standard, and vice versa.

True, what's interesting though is that the trend hasn't quite held up in the tablet space. Go to a coffee shop and it's entirely normal to see tablet users using a keyboard of some sort.

I was going to say that at least tablet users who want keyboards at least buy them as an add-on rather than buying tablets with keyboards built in. Then I realized that a tablet with a built-in keyboard is called a "notebook computer", and they're already quite popular.

Seems to me that it's all about the difference in size. A full-sized physical keyboard is well superior to a virtual one. But on a tiny phone, either way is going to be painful, so it matters much less.