The iPhone 4S has a 3.5 diagonal screen, but a 5.1 inch diagonal frame.
Most Android phones are increasing the screen size while decreasing the bezel, but only the increased screen size gets quoted. The next generation using Ice-Cream Sandwich, such as the Prime you mention, can replace the capacitive keys at the bottom with on-screen buttons, just like Honeycomb tablets. The screen size alone doesn't tell you everything about the device size.
This site shows a comparison (note you can click in the top right corner to resize the pictures to actual size)
I'd handled the HTC Desire HD a fair bit (someone at work has one). The opposite end of increasing as a square is that small increases are bigger than they sound. It's a lot of phone there.
I am sure a lot of people are fine with it.
If they could make everything edge to edge, I'l be right there with with.
At least with Firefox you can drag the images and get a trasparent onion-skin image to move around and compare any edges you want. It's still not much bigger.
Most Android phones are increasing the screen size while decreasing the bezel, but only the increased screen size gets quoted. The next generation using Ice-Cream Sandwich, such as the Prime you mention, can replace the capacitive keys at the bottom with on-screen buttons, just like Honeycomb tablets. The screen size alone doesn't tell you everything about the device size.
This site shows a comparison (note you can click in the top right corner to resize the pictures to actual size)
http://versusio.com/en/google-nexus-prime-vs-apple-iphone-4-...
It's only slightly bigger, yet has nearly double the screen area.