Ever since Samsung Tablet announced its 7 inch tablet the talk of tech industry has been whether Apple will unveil a 7 inch iPad in 2011. Yesterday, during the conference call announcing Apple’s financial results, Steve Jobs “dropped by” and beyond any doubts made it clear that there will probably never be a 7 inch Apple iPad. Steve Jobs attacking Seven-inch tablets called them as “tweeners” and predicted that they will be D.O.A.; Dead On Arrival.
During the conference call Steve Jobs first attacked “non-stop” on Google Android and how Google is trying to cloud the real issues by arguing Android is Open and iOS is closed for five minutes. For the next minutes, Steve Jobs disparaged the “avalanche” of tablets.
Regarding tablets, he first clarified that there is no real avalanche, only a handful of credible tablets are coming out. Giving a lecture on touch screen display size on tablets Steve Jobs said
One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven-inch screen is only 45 percent as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: just 45 percent as large.
If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view, and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these seven-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 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.
Steve Jobs claimed that Apple knows very well that the smallest tablet that will work is 10 inch tablet and explained
Apple has done extensive user testing on user 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.
Steve Jobs: Seven Inch Tablets Are Tweeners
Steve Jobs claimed that there is no place for seven inch tablets as it is neither here nor there. He added that
Every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smartphone. Its ease of fitting into your pocket or purse. Its unobtrusiveness when used in a crowd. Given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pockets, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in their pockets is clearly the wrong trade-off.
The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.
Steve Jobs: Even Google says Froyo is Not Good For a Tablet
Steve Jobs ridiculed that upcoming tablets are all based on Android, while Google says the latest Android is good for tablets.
Almost all of these new tablets use Android software, but even Google is telling the tablet manufacturers not to use their current release—Froyo—for tablets, and to wait for a special tablet release next year. What does it mean when your software supplier says not to use their software in your tablet, and what does this mean when you ignore them and use it anyway?
iPad’s Competitors Will be Dean On Arrival
Steve Jobs claimed that the upcoming tablets can not match the pricing of Apple iPads and they will be dead on arrival. He went on to predict that the iPad competitors will come up with a 10inch tabler next year leaving all the buyers in lurch.
Our potential competitors are having a tough time coming close to iPad’s pricing, even with their far smaller, far less expensive screens. The iPad incorporates everything we’ve learned about building high-value products, from iPhones, iPods and Macs. We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything. And this results in an incredible product at a great price.
The proof of this will be in the pricing of our competitors’ products, which will likely offer less, for more. These are among the reasons that we think that the current crop of seven-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 seven-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product. Sounds like lots of fun ahead.
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