A casual office chat often derails to the endless debate of which phone or computer is better. It’s understandable too. Both vendors and pixel count matter a great deal to mobile users.

Research done by Ericsson indicates that screen size heavily determines the way we employ our portables, from communications and web browsing to social networking and consuming video.

Portable Internet

The video metric provides the most obvious difference in usage per screen size. 4.0-4.5-inch smartphones are used 50% of the time for this particular activity, but tablets are used three times as often to watch video. 7-inch phablets, once thought to be irrelevant, are popular video tools as well.

Web browsing on tablets surprisingly falls behind Internet usage on phablets and 5-to-6-inch smartphones. If we were to guess the reason, it’s probably because tablet owners almost certainly have a smartphone too, and smartphones offer a one-hand browsing experience. Social networking shows nearly identical usage on all types of smartphones (less on tablets), with large smartphones being used the most for this activity.

Small is good, but bigger is better

Smaller 4-inch smartphones are used far less on Facebook and Twitter these days, and have remained traditional communication devices for the most part. So-called ‘small’ handsets with screens capped at 4.5-inches are being primarily used for voice and messaging, according to the Ericsson Moblity report. The cited percentage is just south of 100%.

Interestingly enough, it’s still the phablets that lead the pack in communication services – an insight that could prove very useful to service providers looking to invest in Unified Communications solutions with an eye on mobility. In fact, if we step back a tad and look at the bigger picture (the chart above), it’s clear as daylight that phablets and large smartphones seem to be championing almost every scenario. However, we suspect it’s not just the screen size that drives this heavy usage, but also battery life.

So, what type of device(s) do you own? Do these results reflect your usage as well? Jump in with a comment.