“First, Apple takes Acer to the woodshed over netbooks, now the PC maker takes a bruising for demanding a lady-sized 7-inch tablet,” Ed Sutherland reports for Cult of Mac.
“They’ve just figured out what Apple has known all along: the iPad’s the perfect size for a tablet,” Sutherland reports.
Sutherland reports, “The 7-inch Iconia Tab A100 won’t appear until August or September, insider reports suggest Wednesday. The problem, according to industry publication DigiTimes, is Android 3.0 doesn’t work with seven-inch tablets.”
MacDailyNews Take: They could’ve saved themselves a lot of time, had they simply listened to the guy who invented the device that all others are trying and failing to copy, Apple CEO Steve Jobs:
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 tough 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
“Acer plans to target its 7-inch tablet to women and won’t use the currently-available phone version of Android…. PC tablet makers see the 7-inch niche as a way to survive a market dominated by Apple’s 10-inch iPad,” Sutherland reports. “It appears Acer may be late to another party – those learning a tablet interface cannot be tacked onto an e-reader like display. Already, players like Samsung realize the problem with the smaller displays, offering their tablet in 10-inch, as well as 7-inch versions. Judging by Jobs’ previous negative comments about the smaller screens, we are not likely to see Apple introduce a smaller tablet. This leaves PC makers to be the Guinea pig and recalls the flame-out the tech industry witnessed with netbooks.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Opportun” for the heads up.]