By Stephen Schenck | January 25, 2013 3:52 PM
As the arrival of 1080p screens pushed smartphones up into the five-inch range, we just assumed that we’d have to adapt to larger handsets or wait for 1080p components to shrink down a little. HTC apparently has a different take on the issue, and has been selling its Butterfly in China with what it’s calling the HTC Mini, a phone-like accessory for your smartphone that connects over NFC and Bluetooth.
The idea seems to be that if the five-inch Butterfly is just too ungainly to be used as a phone, you keep the Butterfly in your pocket and use the HTC Mini to actually place calls and check your text messages: a phone for your phone, if you will. It also works as a remote, either for interacting with the Butterfly when it’s connected to an HDTV or for triggering the phone’s camera shutter.
While it does seem to address a number of issues users might have with a larger smartphone, we’re just not sure how to react to this. Is it a graceful solution, or a tacit admission that phones are simply getting too large to be practical? As The Verge points out, this sounds like a great tablet accessory, but for a phone itself? What do you think?
