Ousted Windows boss predicts phablets are the phones of the future

There’s no doubt that smartphone display sizes have been getting bigger ever since Samsung first introduced its original Galaxy Note phablet in 2012 — but are phablets just a niche product or do they have a grander destiny? One-time Microsoft Windows boss Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a professor at Harvard Business School, has written a post on what he thinks will be 2014′s major technology trends and one of them is the rise of Galaxy Note-sized devices as the de facto size for smartphones.

“Today’s phablets seem like a tweener or oddity to some — between a large phone and a small tablet,” Sinofsky writes. “In practice the desire to have one device serve as both your legacy phone (voice and SMS) as well as your main ‘goto’ device for productivity and communication will become increasingly important. The reduction in the need for legacy communication will fuel the need to pivot closer to a larger screen all the time.”