Having to explain this as a guy with small hands to really big guys is annoying. But I have noticed that larger people (physically) don't mind the larger/wider phones. But their hands are actually bigger. I can't use a phone much wider than the iPhone. Once I get to the point that I have to shift the phone in my hand I feel like I'm holding a mini tablet.
I know everyone raves about the bigger devices but I can't use them for more than a few minutes. They're too wide for me, no matter how much I may want to use android I have to side with the women on this one. 3.5" width is the sweet spot for the other 50% of the population. As guys the sooner we realize that our physical characteristics influence what we buy we'll be better off.
For the record my glove size is 7.5, big for womens hands, tiny for guys.
I think a really good example of this phenomenon is the whole screen size debate. The tech press just could not understand why Apple was so hesitant to join in the screen size war and go from 3.5" to 4.0" to 4.3" to 4.7" phones. The tech press is, of course, almost entirely male. Meanwhile, more than half of the potential customer base for these phones is female, and disproportionately young females at that. Females have substantially smaller hands than males. My wife, who has no exposure to the tech press debate over screen size, lamented to me that her new iPhone 5 was great except she didn't like how the screen was bigger and harder for her to use one handed.
Apple gets it. Apple understands that teenager girls are a bigger market than male geeks and designs its products accordingly. If you think, instead, that Apple's dominance is the result of Apple being better at targeting advertisements to teenage girls, then you've completely lost sight of the ball.