Everybody loves a great design, everybody loves designs that do what they're supposed to do, and do it well. Sometimes coming up with a great design is easy and sometimes it is hard. It's hard when there are conflicting design goals; for instance an airplane has to be light, but it also has to be strong. These goals conflict and finding the optimal balance of strength and weight is perhaps the primary problem an aerospace engineer (an "AE" as they were called in undergrad) faces. Similarly, smartphones also have a conflicting set of design imperatives. They must be small, but they also must display a lot of information and be great web browsers and media viewers. 

Being great browsers and media viewers requires a large screen, but having a large screen conflicts with the design imperative to be small. For the AEs, the solution to their strong-but-light dilemma is the use of efficient structures and efficient materials, which means those materials/structures possessing a high strength/weight ratio. For smartphones the solution is also to be efficient but instead of with weight, with existing surface area. For this reason I decided to calculate the ratio of screen area to total surface area for a number of phones to see what kind of progress we've made in how efficiently our phones fill out their dimensions with big beautiful screens.

I'm calling this ratio AE, or Areal Efficiency check out more here 

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