I would guess its far too thick to fit in most women's pants pockets-Im not female, but I have a few coworkers who put iphones in their front pockets of jeans at work sometimes and they say its already a tight fit as-is.

Even if that were the case, optimizing for that problem is fairly silly regardless.

But isn't a usable screen size a big factor when selecting a smartphone? I dread browsing on the credit-card screen or playing games or writing email or doing anything else that I do on my phone

This phone has a pull out keyboard, that means you still get have a similar area to write emails that an iPhone would with a virtual keyboard.

So, for communication and entering text, I don't see how this would be inferior to an iPhone unless you are only using a virtual keyboard. For browsing, you're correct. Scrolling up on a text message in landscape mode is nearly impossible on my iPhone. The vertical screen real estate is smaller than the width of my thumb.

I have an xperia mini pro, which has the same screen size, and playing games and browsing is fine. I probably wouldn't read a book on it, but I happily read blogs, news sites and the like.