“The 7-inch tablet running Android mobile software will be shown at the Google I/O conference, starting today in San Francisco, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private,” Womack, Culpan and King report. “The device will also showcase new features of Android, according to one person, who said the latest version of the software is named Jellybean.”
Womack, Culpan and King report, “Android tablets are already available from companies such as Samsung Electronics Co., HTC Corp. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which Google acquired last month for $12.5 billion. Still, Google is aiming to capitalize on its own brand name. It also seeks to woo consumers with a slimmer device that features the latest software yet carries a lower price than the larger iPad. The newest versions of Apple’s tablet start at $499.”
MacDailyNews Take: Enough silliness. Let’s listen to the guy who invented the device that all others are trying and failing to copy:
One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. 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.
Apple has done extensive user testing on touch interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps… The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead. – Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
Womack, Culpan and King report, “‘When you look at the tablet market, you have iPad — and others,’ said Rhoda Alexander, an analyst at industry researcher IHS iSuppli. ‘Everybody is trying to figure out how to compete against the iPad. And I just see it as just one more experiment going down that road.’”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A tiny screen $199 Fragmandroid tablet isn’t “taking aim” at Apple’s iPad, it’s shooting at Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Flop, er.. Fire.
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