‘iPad mini’ ready for release?

14 years ago

“Even as rumors about Apple’s next generation tablet – dubbed iPad 3 – continue to grow, a report on another gadget called ‘iPad Mini’ – an iPad with a 7.85-inh display that could compete with Kindle Fire – has surfaced,” Wendy Li reports for The International Business Times.

“Taipei-based DigiTimes said that an iPad with a 7.85-inch display (iPad Mini) might be released by Apple in late 2012, or in time for the next Christmas, supposedly to compete with the 7-inch Kindle Fire from Amazon and smartphones with large displays,” Li reports. “iPad currently controls 70% of global tablet market and shipments are expected to touch 60 million units in 2011. However, as competition among various tablets intensifies, Apple will try to maintain its lead over rivals such as Amazon, Samsung, Acer and Toshiba.”

Li reports, “Apple has not confirmed whether it it will actually release a 7.85-inch iPad, but if it does, it will a major shift from what the company’s late co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs regarded. According to Jobs, any tablet smaller than 10 inches are ‘tweener’ devices – too big to be a smartphoe and too small to be a tablet. However, the fact that the 7-inch Kindle Fire is selling like hot cakes and Amazon said it’s the company’s best selling product ever might disprove Jobs’ opinion.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Unless people have evolved fingers that are now half the size they were last month, tiny-screen tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire are failures in the usability department. Tablets that aren’t able to be used are failures. After the initial Christmas rush, the returns will begin or they will be relegated to the status of glorified e-readers by their unfortunate owners.

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