For the past couple years, especially when it came to high-profile smartphones, it’s seemed like designers have been on a race to the bottom with phone thickness. To the credit of the manufacturers involved, we have seen some fantastically thin handsets come out. Past a certain point, though, compromises made to ensure the most slender design possible really start cutting into phone functionality, and battery capacity is a regular causality of this effect. Lately, it seemed like the tide may have been turning, and users were preferring slightly thicker models that offered larger batteries. HTC’s not seeing that trend, though, and says that its own research indicates customers will keep choosing thin phones over more capable models.

The most obvious example of a company backing away from this thinness trend is Motorola, with its Droid RAZR and RAZR Maxx. The Maxx may have seemed like an afterthought at first, but we’ve seen plenty of users expressing preference for it over the original RAZR. That’s hardly proof of how smartphone users overall would behave, but it’s not the only time we’ve seen companies embrace larger batteries to some fanfare. Even HTC has been part of this, hooking the EVO 4G LTE up with a larger battery than the One XL.

As a result of its findings, HTC says it won’t be focusing on large-battery-capacity phones anytime in the near future, and will instead try to keep things thin and rely on the likes of improved power management software to attempt extending battery life.

Are those of us who don’t want to trade functionality for looks just a vocal minority, without the numbers to affect manufacturer decisions? We’d like to think there’s room for both types of phones, but apparently we won’t be getting them all from HTC.

Source: The Verge