What is "phablet"

n. (context neologism English) A mobile device intermediate in size between smartphone and tablet.

The Phablet is a class of mobile computing devices designed to combine or straddle the size format of smartphones and tablets. The word phablet is a portmanteau of the words phone and tablet.

Phablets typically have a diagonal display measurement ranging from — a range that complements screen-intensive activity such as mobile web browsing and multimedia viewing. They may also include software optimized for an integral self-storing stylus to facilitate sketching, note-taking and annotation. Because of their size, phablet use may require two hands.

While Samsung's Galaxy Note (2011) is largely credited with popularizing the phablet when launched in 2011, examples of earlier devices with similar form factors date to 1993.

The popularity of phablets grew dramatically in 2012, as a successor to the original Galaxy Note, along with the falling costs and increasing power efficiency of smartphone displays, began to fuel competition in the market from other smartphone manufacturers, including Lenovo, LG, HTC, Huawei, Micromax, and Sony; IHS reported that 25.6 million phablets were sold in 2012 alone. Due to the market's growth, Reuters called 2013 the "Year of the Phablet". In 2014, noting that phablets had overtaken laptops and desktops in global sales, The New York Times said "phablets could become the dominant computing device of the future — the most popular kind of phone on the market, and perhaps the only computer many of us need".