“Just before Christmas last year, I was speaking to a friend of mine who mentioned that their iPad mini was like their ‘backup brain,’” Matt Baxter-Reynolds writes for ZDNet. “For some reason, this statement was enough to make me go out and buy one.”

“I had planned to keep both the iPad mini and my normal, full-sized iPad. In fact, I sold my full-sized iPad within a day of taking delivery of the mini,” Baxter-Reynolds writes. “he mini just seemed to fit what I needed it for perfectly, whereas the full-sized iPad in comparison immediately felt faintly ridiculous… Whatever is happening out there, there seems to be drift in screen sizes towards devices with screens that are — for the sake of argument — around 6″ for a smartphone and around 8″ for a tablet. So why should the market like small tablets?”

Baxter-Reynolds writes, “On the smartphone side, people are caring less about making phone calls and more about being able to access their digital world regardless of where they are and what primary activity they’re engaged in. Smartphones and tablets both do that last bit well, but a larger screen is needed to gain higher utility… sizes are capped by the typical carrying capacity of a man’s pocket… If everyone in the world carried a purse every time they left the house, perhaps we’d be looking at smartphones and tablets both ending up around the 8″ size… Mind you, none of this explains why a smaller tablet makes sense at home and if you have no intention of taking it out of the house.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Edward W." for the heads up.]