A growing diet for obese phones

BOSTON – The American waistline isn’t the only thing expanding. The latest crop of high-end wireless devices have been testing consumers’ size-and-shape boundaries, and it seems today’s shoppers are prepare to go big or go home.
New numbers from AvianResearch show the BlackBerry Curve at the top of the list of most-popular cellphones for September. Apple’s iPhone comes in second. Indeed, none of the top 10 slots includes a slim clamshell – the form-factor du jour of the past half-dozen years.
These findings could indicate a sea-change in consumer taste, and may open the way for a new crop of mobile Internet devices (MIDs), gadgets that sit in the space between a full laptop and a large smartphone.
Having joined the cellphone-toting crowd during the Razr revolution, this strikes me as exceptional. Apparently, the Razr represented the height of the trim clamshell movement, a trend that favored slenderness above all else.
Indeed, based on the Razr’s success, I assumed the cellphone would continue shrinking indefinitely. In the 2001 comedy “Zoolander,” the main character – a male model – pulls from his pocket a clamshell cellphone the size of a quarter, so small he could lose it in his ear. The joke, of course, is that consumers will continue to demand smaller and smaller phones until they become virtually unusable.
This assumption seems to have gotten blown out of the water, though, by the growing popularity of touchscreen slabs (Samsung Instinct) and slide-out QWERTY powerhouses (Google G1).
Where did the headset-sized phone go? During presentations at the Mobile Internet World conference last week, industry executives showed off a range of gadgets, each bigger than the last. And the latest hot-button handset acronym – MIDs – both figuratively and literally stretches the definition of “pocketable.”
Nonetheless, the facts don’t lie, and it appears that in a few short years consumers have eschewed the slim for the powerful, the lean for the brawny, the Razr for the Curve.