We discuss how important size and weight are when choosing a smartphone.
Hello everyone! For today's post, I decided to choose a simple but very important topic – the size and weight of a smartphone. It came to my mind after the reviews Motorola Moto Z and ZTE Nubia Z11, and before that I did not attach much importance to some of these parameters. Below I will briefly describe my thoughts on each of them.
Thickness. You know, I have always been a supporter of the fact that anything thinner than eight millimeters no longer makes sense, it is better to sacrifice thickness in favor of battery capacity, for example. However, when I tested the Moto Z, several times I caught myself thinking: I like thin smartphones! It is more pleasant to hold in your hands, plus the thickness always affects the weight reduction.
Width. 'What is his frame!' – the most popular comment for any review. In the last couple of years, everyone has started to worry about the width of the frames around the display, and this is easily explained – the smaller the frame, the narrower the smartphone. For a long time, this excessive attention to the frame seemed very far-fetched, until I used the ZTE Nubia Z11. With a 5.5-inch display, the device turned out to be narrower than most competitors and it felt right away. True, I had to pay with ease of use, sometimes no, no, but I touched the display with my palm.
Height. A wonderful term I heard in colleagues' reviews – 'double chin'. It is used to describe long apparatus with large upper and lower frames. And the criticism of our readers of such smartphones is well deserved. Some spend precious space on placing their logo, some on a fingerprint scanner, and some on touch buttons. I am not particularly annoyed if the device is two or three millimeters longer than its competitors, I have no problem using even a very large Asus ZenFone Max.
Noble second chin!
And the touch buttons instead of the on-screen ones, on the contrary, are frustrating, I regularly accidentally touch them, plus everything, manufacturers often save on the backlighting of such keys, as a result, at night you have to navigate blindly. I still prefer the fingerprint scanner under the screen, this arrangement seems to me the most logical and convenient. the main thing is that it was a scanner without an inscribed button, but with an on-screen panel, as in the latest Moto.
Weight. It is always difficult to assess the adequacy of the weight of a particular model, do not think that it is enough to simply compare the numbers with competitors. Much depends on how well a particular model fits in your hand. I didn’t like LeEco Le Max 2 for this parameter, despite its heavy weight, it was very comfortable to use.
But the light weight of the flagship Moto Z (135 grams with a 5.5-inch diagonal) played an important role in the perception of the device, it felt downright 'airy'. Even if the smartphone is heavy, you always perceive it in a different way: in one case, the heaviness adds solidity to it, in the other, it makes a heavy brick out of it.
To summarize: the key parameter, in my opinion, is the width and thickness of the case, it makes sense to evaluate the weight along with other characteristics, and the criticism of the height depends on what caused the second chin. If you try to find a device close in all the described parameters, then I immediately recall Sharp Aquos Crystal, about which Artem wrote.
While the less exotic Moto Z also looks like a good example of size and weight choices, if, like me, you love the front fingerprint scanner paired with the onscreen buttons.
What are your priorities in terms of these parameters, dear readers? What can persuade you to buy, and what can, on the contrary, scare you away?