Xiaomi launched its largest display smartphone on Tuesday, the Mi Max. Featuring a 6.44-inch display, the smartphone is available in three variants, ranging from a 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage model up to a 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage model. China and its massive adoption of large-screen smartphones, or phablets as they are called, was single-handedly responsible for making Apple reverse its decision on smartphone display sizes being limited to 4 inches. It s in this phablet-obsessed market that Xiaomi has launched its largest smartphone till date. (Also see: Xiaomi Mi…

Wireless providers in the United States make it easy to pay more than you should for a smartphone and an accompanying data plan. Here are eight questions you can ask (and answer) to make sure you get the best possible deal. In the ever-expanding phablet category, the Nokia Lumia 1520 is currently the biggest of them all, with its 6-inch display winning the spec battle over the 5.7-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Apple s new 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus. (Sony s Experia Z Ultra is larger, at 6.4 inches, but you can t buy it in the U.S. from any carrier.) I ve had a chance to tinker…

Oh man, here we go. Phablets are no longer no longer constrained to limits of being under half a foot. Huawei s new Ascend Mate is an unprecedented 6.1-inches. It s been around before, but now it s official, and has the largest screen of any smartphone in the world. To date anyway. Cower in fear beneath its all-encompassing shadow. Aside from its ludicrous 6.1-inch, 361 ppi display, the Ascend Mate has a 4, 050mAh battery and a 1.5GHz HiSilicon K3V3 quad-core chip, both of which it ll need to handle that wild screen that makes up 73 percent of the whole device. It runs Android…

Hardware manufacturers are finally taking large Android tablets seriously, just in time for the software to complete the picture. Android tablets have a long and storied history of not being very good. Despite dozens of options available to consumers, the overall experience — by which I mean third-party software, battery life, and hardware quality — has struggled. The combination of race to the bottom pricing and lacking software made the 7-inch tablet significantly more popular, and as a result the larger tablet market slowed for a while. This year, things are on a noticeable…

BARCELONA — After years and years of smartphone manufacturers racing to fit a larger screen into a ever-shrinking case, we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it s about 5 to 5.5 inches wide. And it happened just as Apple gave in and joined the fray. On Sunday, Samsung showed off not one, but two flagship smartphones — the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge — and they both have a 5.1-inch screen. HTC s One M9, launched on the same day, has a 5-inch screen. The screen size on both devices is exactly the same as on their predecessors, the Galaxy S5 and the One M8…

According to The NPD Group Connected Intelligence Device Marketplace Report, U.S. nationwide carriers devoted about a third of their shelf space to devices with a 4.7 inch or larger screen in the second quarter (Q2) of this year, up from just 4 percent in Q2 2012. Sales growth has lagged, however, behind product availability. U. S. sales of smartphones with 4.7 inch or larger screens now account for more than a quarter of sales, up from 2 percent in Q2 2012 according to NPD Mobile Phone Track. “Larger screens mean a much richer content experience for smartphone users, ” said…

Smartphones, especially Android and Windows Phone devices, have been growing rapidly in size over the past few years, from devices with mere 4-inch displays to those with screens almost six inches in size. Today Nokia is announcing its largest devices yet. The new Lumia 1520 (along with its low-end counterpart, the Lumia 1320) features a massive 6-inch display, making it the largest Windows Phone ever released. The 1520 is also the first Windows Phone with a 1080p screen and Qualcomm s Snapdragon 800 processor. The 1520 retains Nokia s familiar design language — it s a single…

Rich Trenholm/CNET is the first handset to use the same sky-high screen resolution as some of the most expensive TVs out there. That sounds impressive, but despite claims from Sony and others, 4K resolution on a phone-sized screen isn t going to produce a drastically sharper, clearer image for viewing text, photos and videos. In fact, your eyes probably won t even be able to tell the difference. A 4K smartphone seems like an inevitable evolution in the industry, as engineers continue to improve the performance of shrunken internal components like camera sensors and computing…

The Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 is a huge tablet that has been modified with the TouchWiz and Magazine UX. It will have LTE-capable models that will soon become available on the market. ( Samsung ) Tablets give off the impression that they are portable, handy and easy to slip inside one s handbag. Samsung, Apple and Microsoft have decided to push the tablet s capabilities a little bit further by producing bigger versions. These tablets are also expected to deliver business-oriented features with a greater focus on multitasking. Perhaps the first question that one should ask about these…

Dear Lifehacker, I can t decide between the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. What are the actual benefits of that large screen on the Plus? It almost looks too big to use with one hand. Sincerely, Small Hands Malloy Dear Small Hands, This is a question we ve been hearing a lot. The big iPhone 6 Plus is worrying several potential buyers who aren t sure what the actual point of this large device is. While we can t give an exact answer till the iPhone 6 Plus is here, I have used plenty of phablets that give a good enough idea of what you can expect with such phones. Small differences…

Last year, Toshiba introduced the Excite 13, an Android tablet with a ridiculously mammoth 13-inch display. At the time I thought this super-size slate was more of a curiosity than anything else. As it turns out, it was just too small. With the recent announcement of the Dell XPS 18, there are now four plus-size portable all-in-ones either on the market or coming soon. All of these devices come with built-in batteries that let you, in theory, carry them around like a tablet. It may seem crazy, but these devices have a real chance at succeeding. Here’s why. 1. They re portable…

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is dead. After some handsets from both the initial run and from a second run of replacement phones caught fire, Samsung yanked it entirely. Samsung, you can t buy it from legitimate sellers and, depending on where you live, your carrier may even send angel of death software to brick existing Note 7 phones to keep you from using it. (In the US, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will send out this software. Verizon will not.) Samsung says that 93 percent of its US customers have now returned the potentially faulty device, which is also banned from all…

Enormous. Ridiculous. Gigantic. Plain silly. Those are some of the words more than two dozen people used to describe the experience talking on the Samsung Galaxy Mega, which AT&T began selling today for $149.99. The phone is essentially identical to the popular Samsung Galaxy S4, with one exception: It is immense. Really immense. The Mega has a 6.3-inch screen, making it among the largest smartphones in the world - among because the Sony Xperia Z Ultra has a 6.4-inch screen, winning the bigger-is-better award by a hair. Both are in some ways too big. Hold the Mega to…

Way back in 2010, when the iPad first came out, there was a strain of criticism that now feels a bit ridiculous. (Besides the one about it being just a big iPod.) “The iPad is too heavy!” they cried. And too big! 9.7 inches is basically a billboard! How am I supposed to carry around a billboard!? How quaint. With five years of hindsight, that first iPad now looks like the little capsule you get at Toys R’ Us that expands in water to become a giant foam dinosaur. It spawned a universe of tablets determined to figure out where a tablet ends, and where an all-in-one/television/Jumbotron…