While some might be waiting for a smaller version of the iPad to come out from Apple, CEO Steve Jobs threw some ice water on such expectations. “We think the current crop of seven-inch tablets are going to be DOA dead on arrival,” said Jobs during a conference call.
“I’d like to comment on the ‘avalanche’ of tablets poised to enter the market in the coming months,” said Jobs. “First, it appears to be just a handful of credible entrants not exactly an avalanche. One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 per cent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.”
Giving his audience a refresher course in plane geometry, he continued: “The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven-inch screen is only 45 per cent as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right just 45 per cent as large.”
He stated that this size, “Isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion.”
“While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size, Jobs noted. “We really understand this stuff. There are clear limits on how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them.”
“Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and [they’ll] increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the seven-inch bandwagon,” he predicted.
Source: The Register
