Tech writer JR Raphael, in 11 tech buzzwords that need to go away, excoriates the "phablet" as a made up term that serves no real purpose, going so far as to write, "Hey, I get it: We live in a time when portmanteaus such as "Bennifer," "Brangelina," "TomKat," and "Portmanteau" are somehow things a person can say without getting smacked upside the head. But society doesn't have to be one big issue of US Weekly. Leave the contrived combos to Billy Bush, won't ya?"
He's not the only person who feels this way. I can't post a blog or Google+ post that uses the term "phablet" without similar comments from readers, some of whom are so passionately opposed to my use of the term that you might think that I was the one who coined it.
But they're wrong, at least unless and until someone comes up with a better alternative. The usual argument is that no alternative is necessary because they're really just "very large phones", but is that really how people see them who buy them?
Without any particular survey data to go on, I can only speak of what I've seen, and my own experience is that while no one denies that they are phones, most of the people who bought them understood them to be at least a different category, straddling the divide between large smartphones and small tablets.
They didn't buy a 5+-inch device because they thought that was the best size for a phone, they bought it because it was the best size for getting the best experience out of a touchscreen-centric computing device that is also small enough to be reasonably handheld. That it is also a phone just makes the choice that much easier, because cellphones are something most people need anyways.
Much as smartphones have proliferated as rapidly as they have through the convergence of PDA's, portable media and gaming devices, and phones because there is no longer a need to buy those as separate devices, the "phablet" proliferates through the convergence of the smartphone and small tablet markets. Why pick on "phablet", yet not have any issue with "smartphone", itself a tech buzzword referring to the convergence of the phone with other categories of devices? There are a lot of differences between a Blackberry and an iPhone, yet we call them both smartphones.
Or consider Samsung's push to standardize the stylus as a component of the "phablet". No one is pushing for styli for smaller smartphones, and yet they are being pushed for these larger "smartphones". Traditionally a smartphone is a one-handed device (the S III pushes the limits of this), but "phablets" are clearly meant to be used (at times) with two hands, which also lends itself well to a stylus.
The other argument against "phablet" is that they could best be described as small tablets, but very few people even buy 3G or 4G data enabled tablets, let alone a tablet that doubles as a phone, and I don't think we're ever likely to see true tablets of any size doubling as phones for many people. Phones are meant to be used one-handed and pretty much always have been.
Is phablet a strange "mashup" word like "refrig-toaster"? Perhaps. So, come up with a better one, because it's clear to me at least that they are in a category of their own, even though they overlap with smartphones and small tablets, and as such are deserving of their own name.
What do you think? Are they a category of their own, as I suggest, or should they simply be called "large smartphones" or "small tablets"?
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