Why did it take us so long to see the need?

John Martellaro writes.
Apple resisted the idea of a phablet for a long time and so did its customers. But times have changed, and we've moved on.[...]
...as the iPhone grew in great power and complexity, people started to use iPhones not just as smart telephones but as portable Internet devices for all kinds of new services.

Well, personally I don't get this long cultural lag. For one thing, I've been writing articles here since the Note 1 came out, begging Apple to make a similar "bigphone" as I called it before the clumsy term "phablet" was invented.

For another thing: way back in 2007 (for heaven's sake), Jobs introduced the iPhone as *three* things, only one of which were a phone. (Why did they even call it a phone? It's a hand-computer). One of those was a web browser. And then when I tried web browsing on a 3.5-inch iPhone, I screamed in frustration. It was like digging a garden with a teaspoon. Most web sites were nigh impossible to use or read.
Who, I wonder, did not have the same experience?
In other words, how could it not be obvious to anybody that smartphones are/have been too small?

I must admit that for a while, this size category did not occur to me. But I did write in mid-2009: "I don't even like many regular web pages on my iPod touch, very often the screen is simply too small for it work well."
And when the Samsung Note1 5.2-inch came out, I yelled (and wrote) "Heureka", and not: "Booo, that's for geeks only..."

Image by me, from my 2011 article, saying:
"apart from the price, this is currently the portable ereader to have"