The history of large phones, from a technical standpoint:
LTE required a lot more power than 2G/3G until efficiencies were improved, this required a larger battery to have comparable battery life, doubly so on the phones that ran two modems (mostly Verizon) one for 3G, one for 4G
LTE required larger antennas as their low band frequencies were lower than previous cellular tech. (750MHz and later 600MHz vs 850MHz being the old lowest)
Handset manufacturers then stopped making smaller product lines even after efficiencies improved
People (“consumers”) realized they’d rather not buy a phone, tablet, watch, computer, anal implant, and preferred to just buy one device, settling on an oversized phone was enough between phone/tablet that they only needed to waste money on one device
The market then went, “people prefer larger phones,” even though smaller phones were waning/outliers
Tablets outside of Apple’s ostensibly died, although there are a few more choices these days that aren’t Apple
Now phones have so many antennae
WiFi/BT (which are often shared)
WiFi 6 new band
NFC
Wireless charging coil
Ultra Wideband
20 or 30 various cellular bands with 4x antennae for MIMO
mmWave (in America)
Phones also have gigantic camera systems (although since Samsung gave up on 10x optical, they shrunk slightly on that platform)
The cycle repeated itself a bit with 5G, the channels are so wide and huge, they can suck a lot of power when doing large data transfers, and also the addition of needing a separate amp/chip for 5G above sub6 as well as additional cooling
“AI” stuff that requires more ML compute, and thus cooling and battery capacity, even though again, nobody wanted it
All the metrics and analytics handset manufacturers constantly run on users, disabling all this alone would probably make your average phone last 3+ days
Since then, more and more people are trying to get flip phones, dumbphones, imported small phones, or giving up on phones entirely and switching to devices like the Lilygo T-Deck LoRaWAN device that has…dun dun dunnnnn…a literal BlackBerry keyboard, as people are sick of that fabled market deciding for them.
The history of large phones, from a technical standpoint:
Since then, more and more people are trying to get flip phones, dumbphones, imported small phones, or giving up on phones entirely and switching to devices like the Lilygo T-Deck LoRaWAN device that has…dun dun dunnnnn…a literal BlackBerry keyboard, as people are sick of that fabled market deciding for them.