If you find that your carrier is pushing you away from smaller smartphones and toward phablet behemoths like the Galaxy Note 3, there could be a good reason for it. Research released last week from the NPD Group shows that users who buy smartphones with bigger displays on average use more data per month than users who buy smartphones with smaller displays. In all, smartphone owners with devices at less than 4.5 inches used an average of 5GB of data per month while smartphone owners with devices of 4.5 inches or greater used an average of 7.2GB per month.
Although you’d certainly expect to find people who own larger smartphones to watch more videos on their devices, NPD found that large smartphone owners also used more data across multiple types of apps including social media, navigation, retail and music. The means that carriers such as Verizon and AT&T that have tiered data plans should really love selling bigger devices whose owners will either subscribe to more expensive data plans or get hit with data overage fees. Or put more simply, bigger smartphones may mean bigger money for wireless companies.
