Again, the Titan is huge.
Consumers love giant smartphones. Vendors keep cranking them out and people keep buying them. While there are numerous and obvious advantages to big smartphone displays, there are also several drawbacks. The negative outweighs the positive for me.
The huge screen affords a great canvas for e-mails, Web pages, images and video. But stretching 480 x 800-pixel resolution over a panel that measures 4.7-inches diagonally means clarity and sharpness suffer. Usability suffers as well, and a perfect example is the back button. On Windows Phone devices, the back button is extremely important. There is often no way to navigate back one screen from within the UI, and holding down the capacitive back key also brings up the application switcher. While holding the device in my right hand, I cannot reach the back button at all. Not even close.
I also can't reach the lock/unlock button without repositioning the device in my hand, though this is infinitely less important than the back key. This button is crucial to the operation of the device, and one-handed use is often my preferred method of operation. It just doesn't work. Samsung solved the problem by repositioning the back button on its giant Galaxy S II smartphone to make it accessible during one-handed use. This left the menu key just out of reach, but it's better to hide that one than the back button.
Somewhere around 4 inches lies the sweet spot for me, and a scaled down device like the Titan with a display around that size would be my ideal Windows Phone.
There's one more big challenge: Third-party apps.
I cannot for the life of me find a decent Twitter app, for example. There are a handful of usable options -- I've landed on Seesmic for the time being -- but they're all slow and clunky. The Metro interface is beautiful, but it loses its allure quickly when a data refresh takes 10 seconds.
