“I’ve seen a fair bit of speculation that, if Apple produces a 7-inch iOS device, then maybe it would be a bigger iPod Touch, not a smaller iPad,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball. “One aspect of this line of thinking is that rather than making on-screen tap targets smaller (and, the worry goes, perhaps too small), a bigger iPod Touch would make tap targets bigger.”
“Whatever the merits of that idea (and I don’t think it has many), that’s not what Apple is doing,” Gruber writes. “For one thing, the rumored device has a very specific screen size: 7.85 inches diagonally, 1024 × 768 pixels. That’s far closer to 8 inches than 7. In fact, it’s closer to 8 inches than the 9.7-inch iPad-as-we-know-it is to 10 inches — so if you want to round to the nearest integer, it would be more accurate to call it an 8-inch iPad than a 7-inch one. Plus, the aspect ratio matches the iPad, not the iPhone/iPod Touch.”
Gruber writes, “For another thing, I and others have heard from Cupertino-area little birdies that what Apple has been working on in the lab is a smaller iPad, not a bigger iPod. Same goes for last week’s reports from Bloomberg and the WSJ… A 7.85-inch iPad display would be about as tall, physically, as the current 9.7-inch iPad display is wide… Take a screenshot on your iPad, then view the screenshot on the iPad but rotate the device. This shrinks the screenshot to fit — almost exactly the same reduction in size as this purported iPad Mini… (If this poor man’s approximation isn’t exact enough for you, earlier today <a href="http://seveneightyfive.fscked.com/" target="_blank"Richard Gaywood put together a web page with iPad screenshots scaled to roughly 81 percent, which, when viewed on an existing iPad, have a diagonal of exactly 7.85 inches.) The exact size of the purported iPad Mini display offers 66 percent of the surface area of a 9.7-inch iPad, not 45 percent [as with 7-inch tablets].”
Much more in the full article here.