Large Screen Apple iPhones and Amazon Kindle Phones And The Rise Of Mobile Video

Why did Steve Jobs not like the idea of a large screen iPhone or an iPad mini? He had different reasons. A 5" iPhone was too big and a 7" iPad was too small. They were, in his words "tweeners."

Maybe Jobs should have talked to some actual tweens who use anything they can get their hands on to watch videos . As you can see in the chart below, after a steep rise, the growth of overall online video has slowed a bit, but mobile video is just kicking in. Mobile video had a 20% share of all connected consumer electronics video in 2013 and is expected to double by 2019.

Steve Jobs was a great innovator, but he didn't get mobile video. In fact most people who came of age before the smartphone can't really conceive of how popular watching video is on the (really) small screen. Samsung, the world's leading maker of flat screens, understands TV. The growing screen size of their Galaxy S smartphones and Note phablets neatly tracks the growth of mobile video consumption.

I asked a bunch of mobile designers I know what kinds of apps would benefit from larger screen iPhones. Mobile consultant and founder of Polar, Luke Wroblewski, offered that "the ability to make elements bigger for (primarily) readability," would be the biggest benefit. "There's lots of people with the font size boosted on their devices so they can read the copy. Other than that apps with canvas areas like Maps or areas for things like drawing/games will benefit," he concluded.

Design director Scott Jenson, now at  Google , was more biting. "Do you see a bunch of different apps for Android depending on a 4, 5, or 6 inch screen? Of course not. It's clear that there is a difference between an iPhone and an iPad but if Android has taught us anything, is that there is a gradual line between them." He agreed with Wroblewski that, "Yes things like games, movies, reading and drawing apps are all be bit nicer with larger screens but they are STILL used by the smaller screens as well."

Jenson pointed to how larger iPhones will push iOS further into fragmentation, something Android designers have been dealing with forever, but a relatively new concern in the world of iOS. I will return to this fragmentation in a forthcoming post, but it was particularly the lack of enthusiastic responses about unique uses for large screen iPhones from my sources that convinced me that video is the real "killer app" for larger screened phones .

There is clearly demand for more video coming from users (particularly younger ones) but what really cements the deal is the interest from advertisers. Gartner is forecasting that online advertising will more than triple by 2017 and "video will show the highest growth." Agencies like mobile video because it plays to their strengths—making high-quality content with expensive, high-concept ideas. Combine these traditional skills with a dose of machine learning and you can generate a matrix of customized versions of a video and still preserve the idea of a campaign. The rising tide of mobile video, particularly among the young, creates big opportunities for advertisers as well as the companies that rely on advertising revenues to subsidize content.

And speaking of advertising revenues that subsidize free content, Amazon is rumored to be preparing a 5" smartphone in its Kindle Fire line with a unique 3D eye tracking interface to go with its free, ad-supported streaming service. In gear with its recently announced set top streaming box, the phone is another lever in Amazon's attempt to pry some streaming video share from Netflix —and Apple. The Wall Street Journal's sources say that Amazon'e new phone will feature, “retina-tracking technology” that will allow users to “navigate through content using just their eyes.” Whether or not Amazon has the technology to make this really work or not, the information cloud that the company is emitting around the product (through the WSJ) certainly suggests that this will be a device significantly oriented to content consumption—particularly video content.

Amazon will price these phones at a loss and make it up in mobile product sales, advertising and, of course, customer data collection. Combined with a robust free streaming video service, this product could have broad appeal. Given this focus, a 4" version does not seem to even be on the table.

Clearly the demand for big screen iPhones is there, as shown in recent Polar polls. When asked "Which iPhone size would you prefer?" 81% preferred a 4.7" iPhone over 19% for a 4" iPhone. But when the question was framed as, "Which New 2014 iPhone Model Will You Buy?" almost 30,000 people responded that they wanted an iPhone even larger than what is rumored for this Fall, with 55% favoring an iPhone measuring 5.5 Inches over 45% who preferred one at 4.7 Inches.

As to why it has taken Apple so long to grasp what Samsung understood in 2010, that people want to watch (a lot) of video on their smartphones, I can only think that Steve Jobs enduring legacy and the generation of managers he installed have continued to exert influence on the company's imagination. To Apple, the desktop has always been the hearth to which iDevices are docked. The desktop could be a laptop or someday a TV, but Apple's cloud services are still not first-class replacements for the original vision. The force field of this assumption, that the big screen is where the loyalty lays, has been soundly disproved by younger users whose clear allegiance is to their phones .

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