I want to write a paper on Mobile Screens in HCI, as phones are getting uncomfortably big for users, I want to provide some solution to the big screen phones or how logically state that how small screen phones are suitable for the user.
Coming back to question, for the above-mentioned reason, I was going to make a survey of big phone screen users, and I was going to mention it in my paper, is it okay to mention brand names of phones and their specific products with images?
For cases of the type you mention I would probably recommend not naming the brands. The reason for this is that the manufacturer is unlikely to be happy if you say that their equipment is not very good (and they can't all be good or there is nothing to write about). This is particularly important if they have given you samples/equipment to use for research.
The lab I'm at has done several comparisons of various software and microscopes for surface metrology and in all cases the equipment/software is just referred to as A, B, C etc.
While from my point of view the reasons for doing this are purely maintaining good relations I expect there is a legal aspect too. I know we have received long loans/discounts on some instruments which presumably involves a contract saying we can't publish anything negative about the instrument.
If a company has provided some equipment used in this sort of thing you may wish to put them in the acknowledgements. Although be aware this may de-anomimise you data. If very few people make an instrument of a certain type saying thanks to company X makes it obvious what it is. On the other hand knowledgeable readers could probably make an educated guess anyway.
I don't know about hardware, but in case you feel like mentioning some software (and hardware often comes with software...), beware that the EULA can prohibit researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers.
Oracle is notorious for that, they sued David DeWitt following some benchmarks he had published that mentioned Oracle, see the DeWitt Clause. Luckily the University of Wisconsin supported him, but Oracle banned all Wisconsin alumni for a while.
Although in some fields, this may be a problem, as Franck Dernoncourt has explained, in other fields, it is not only a good idea, but expected. For instance, in the laboratory sciences, you would normally list the vendors and suppliers who provided the "raw materials" being used, as well as, in many cases, the experimental apparatuses used to study them.
