“We’ve obtained exclusive footage this morning of a new Motorola tablet that looks to be a lot sleeker and thinner than the 10-inch Xoom that launched earlier this year; the slightly angled corners are reminiscent of the Photon 4G, so this looks to be a new design language the company is continuing to pursue,” Chris Ziegler reports for This is my next. “You can just barely make out that it’s running Honeycomb’s camera app, so it’s running Android — we just don’t know what version.”
MacDailyNews Take: Nor does anyone care.
Ziegler reports, “Our tipster points out that the Motorola logo appears to be at the upper left in a portrait orientation, and we think we’re looking at micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports on the other end. The screen also seems to be 16:9, and we’re willing to bet this is the “fun” and “portable” 7-inch model that Moto CEO Sanjay Jha promised we’d see before the end of the year.”
Full article with photos of Moto’s next flop (if it ever even gets released) here.
MacDailyNews Take: Smart people listen to the man who invented the category:
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
Stupid people don’t.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Judge Bork” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Beleaguered RIM slashes price of anemic-selling 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook in half for Rogers employees – September 16, 2011
More blood on Apple iPad’s touchscreen: Sharp pulls plug on main ‘Galapagos’ tablets – September 15, 2011
More blood on Apple iPad’s touchscreen: Dell’s Streak 5 tablet is dead – August 12, 2011
More blood on Apple iPad’s touchscreen: Plastic Logic abandons e-reader – August 11, 2010
Apple’s iPad has blood on its touchscreen: eReader-maker iRex files for bankruptcy – June 11, 2010
Poof! RIM’s vaporous Android-powered tablet evaporates – May 05, 2010
Poof! Microsoft’s vaporous ‘Courier’ slate PC evaporates – April 29, 2010
Poof! HP’s vaporous slate PC evaporates – April 28, 2010