screen sizes and analytics

Tags: Design
October 23, 2008 by Barbara

I pulled down AdMob Mobile Metrics, as I always do when they have new data. The results were fascinating, including the fact that the Motorola RAZR and KRZR remain the top two devices accessing the web in the US for the second year running. Of course keep this with a grain of salt: this is devices that access the web either using the AdMob ad network or an AdMob Analytics customer.

AdMob categorized devices in each country according to small, medium, large, and extra large. Larger devices were more typically found in the US and UK, with smaller devices found in Indonesia, India, and South Africa. At the same time, those latter countries’ devices tended to be more capable.

We haven’t found where the MMA defines screen sizes. After all, “small” would be a great thing to know. We typically define small as “width less than 176”. The MMA does, however, define banner sizes using small, medium, large, and extra large. Here they are, with the Little Springs estimates of the corresponding screen size:





 MMA label  MMA ad 
width 		 Estimated display size 
Small120128×128, 128×160, 160×160
Medium168176×208, 176×220
Large216240×320
Extra Large300320×240, 320×480

The above table is useful, but leaves some newer devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia, HTC Touch Diamond, and Blackberry Bold. Each of these is 480 pixels wide! (The Bold is merely 320 tall but the others are much larger). A 300 pixel banner will look a little lost.

This got us wondering just what the pixel sizes were here. After all, the Bold screen is as wide as the iPhone screen, but is 480 rather than 320 pixels. And the Xperia, at 480×800, has a 3 inch diagonal screen. And we found that the “small” screens tend to have 110-120 pixels per inch, “medium” screens have 125-150 pixels per inch, “large” have 142-193 pixels. And extra large are all over the map.

This data is by no means particularly accurate, and we have a tiny sample. If you’d like to help, just collect some of your old phones and look up their specs. We need to know the phone name, the pixel width and height, then either the mm width and height or the inch diagonal (this is how it’s been reported everywhere). If you can do this, please fill out our quick form and it’ll be added to the database. So far, this site has physical dimensions 70% of the time.

What will we do with the data? First, we’ll publish information correlating reported screen size (pixels) to pixels per inch. This will be up on our mobile design resources site. Second, we’ll negotiate with Luca Passani, who runs WURFL, to add this data to the database so everybody can figure out the correct size.

After all, the HTC Touch Diamond and the Nokia N96 have the same physical screen size but one is VGA and the other is QVGA. A 30×30 icon will be 0.21 inches on one and 0.105 on the other.


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5 Comments »

  1. Nice post Barbara.

    On the MMA Banner Sizes - these were determined a couple of years ago by taking some modal values of screen sizes in the market at the time, leaving some room for chrome, and making the sizes divisible. I think there’s scope for an XXL as you say.

    Also thought folks would be interested in dotMobi’s DeviceAtlas. With the latest release people can now log in and contribute their values of screen size and other properties of devices. Also as part of DeviceAtlas there’s now ta-da.mobi which you connect to using your phone and run through some simple tests to determine device properties, including figuring out screen size.

    HTH
    Jo

    Comment by Jo Rabin — October 25, 2008 @ 12:03 am

  2. Jo,

    When researching for this post, I did go over to DeviceAtlas to see if the physical dimensions were included. Either they are not, or the page is organized in a way that I couldn’t find it. I looked for diagonal measurement or mm tall/wide. Is the physical size there?

    I did find the “edit this data”, which I think will go a long way to making popular phones’ data more accurate.

    (I picked a device likely to have a large amount of data available: the iPhone)

    Comment by Barbara — October 27, 2008 @ 11:46 am

  3. Let me throw in another complication: handsets whose screen can display in either portrait or landscape. In this case, looking up screen alone won’t help you choose the right size for your content.

    Comment by Tom Hume — October 30, 2008 @ 3:26 pm

  4. Absolutely! SOME platforms will let you display different information upon rotate, SOME do not.

    Comment by Barbara — October 30, 2008 @ 3:58 pm

  5. Hi Barbara,

    I just bumped into this post on mobile screen sizes. You might find the information there useful to your initiative.

    Tsahi

    Comment by Tsahi Levent-Levi — November 9, 2008 @ 1:00 pm

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