Display aspect ratios are a hot topic this year as the hegemony of 16:9 is coming to an end – high end and some mid-range phones are switching to 18:9 or even wider en masse. But we have to remember that 16:9 did not always rule.
We plotted the aspect ratios of handsets in our database – both smartphones and featurephones. Note that this is based on the phones released each year, regardless of their popularity or sales. Not that it’s hard to see which phones sold well and which didn’t.
We can see three major eras. The 16:9 era (which is now coming to an end) started exploding in the…