“Nothing lasts forever and leaders are always toppled, but there is one exception to this rule, and that’s Apple’s iPad,” Vlad Savov reports for The Verge. “The iPad grabbed the title of best tablet device when it launched in 2010, and it’s held onto it ever since. This past year has seen an exhibition of iPad clones emerging, culminating in Samsung’s perfect pair of Galaxy Tab S2 copycats: they’re the same size as Apple’s iPads, use a similar metal frame, and even have the same 4:3 aspect ratio. This isn’t competition. It’s capitulation.”
“Recall, if you will, how many unanswered questions there were around tablets when the iPad was introduced. Filling the gap between laptops and phones meant making a choice between a desktop or a mobile operating system. HP and Microsoft opted for the supposedly more capable desktop choice, Apple went for upscaling its iPhone OS. The iPad won that battle,” Savov reports. “Then there was the question of size, with some prototype tablets stretching all the way to 15 inches (acting as essentially keyboard-less laptops), but Apple set the standard at just under 10 inches. And finally, most under-appreciated of all, perhaps, is the issue of the aspect ratio: Apple chose the squarer 4:3 format while almost everyone else went for the widescreen 16:9 or 16:10, which would better match the dimensions of a movie. Well, now we can conclusively say that the iPad’s won that battle as well.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple leads. The rest follow at a great distance. As usual.
Apple has done extensive user testing on touch interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. — Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Daniel N.” for the heads up.]