That haunting question, “Does Size Matter?” – it’s asked so often in life about many things… cars, cakes, houses, but today, we’re looking at phones.

With Apple recently announcing the launch of the iPhone SE, “The Most Powerful 4 inch smart phone ever”,  it begs the question – what size of phone do we really want? Join me as I explore the options…

On the 21st March 2016, Apple announced the launch of  a new addition to the iPhone range – one which looks like the iPhone 5, acts like the iPhone 6, and all within a 4 inch screen. 

The iPhone SE

Now let’s head wayyyyy back (and I mean, really push your mind as far back as you can) to when I was a small boy, and had my first mobile phone. Now don’t laugh…

You laughed, didn’t you? I knew it! OK so my BT Cellnet wasn’t the hippest phone on the market, but it did the job. Believe it or not, it even sent SMS – or texts as the cool kids call them now! Your text would scroll across the screen, letter by letter, and had a maximum of around 25 characters I believe! Not nearly enough space to explain to someone why you didn’t want to go to the cinema. Don’t fear though – you had around 10 free texts a week to send – 250 characters should do, right?

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Horray for my new phone. The Trium Mars. I remember getting this phone for Christmas. I left it charging and my mum dropped it by accident – the screen smashed. Oh yes, even back in the day phone screens weren’t half as durable as I’d like. Look at my snazzy wallpaper too! A butterfly… how nice! Finally, my text messages could be shown on an entire screen. What’s that maybe 1 or 2 inches at most? Perfect! This phone even had W@P – a snazzy green and black internet browser that you never opened – no free data here! It was going to take at least £2 from your credit just for opening it! But the screen size was great.

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Next we move on to quite easily one of the best phones I ever owned – the Nokia 3310. No broken screens here! And the battery life? I’m pretty confident if I looked it out from the attic, it would still be at around 20%. That’s a great battery! The Nokia 3310 introduced to the beloved SNAKE, and even allowed us to send “Picture Messages” by way of large “emojis”. Some snazzy technology right there. The Nokia 3310 – a perfectly sized screen. Right?

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I couldn’t take you on a tour of every mobile phone I’ve ever owned, but I bring you to this next beauty. A bigger screen – a colour screen, and a camera! This screen was definitely big enough to see my photos I’d taken on my super cool 1 megapixel camera. It could display websites, and it still had the physical buttons you’d need to navigate around – trust me, there was a lot less spelling errors using the old “T9 Keyboards” – but the character count (and limited text messages) did cause us to be really lazy, and led to the awful text speak “that u nw c lyk dis evrywhre”. – Yep, that was the fault of all of these mobile phones!

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Flash forward to March 2016, here’s my lovely, 5.something inch Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. I can comfortably watch movies on it, I’ve a full qwerty keyboard, I can write text messages longer than this article and I can get on Habbo! How far we’ve come. But it’s not so good in my pocket – so is this size of screen necessary?

Apple certainly seems to think so! Offering users the option to go back to a 4 inch screen. It packs all the punch of the iPhone 6s – we’re talking an elite camera, 4K video, A9 processing chip – the whole shebang! Personally when I lift an older iPhone, for example the iPhone 4, I can’t believe how small it feels, and don’t understand how the user can cope with such a small screen! “You watch videos on this thing?!”. So my question readers is this – could you go back to a 4 inch screen? And if so, why? Do you prefer a bigger screen? Again, if so, why?

Answers on a post card. Or below in the comments. Or indeed over at the forums! I look forward to hearing from you all! 🙂

Hillary Egg does not wish to comment on this matter as she hates technology after her email scandal.

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