a) The 7 inch iPad has been confined to the Apple hall of unreleased products never to see the light of day.
b) Its announcement is inevitable.
Lets take a look at the arguments for either side. The best arguments against the release of a 7 inch iPad were brought up by Jobs himself in a recent Q4 Earnings conference call - namely that the screen is actually only 45 % the size of the 10 inch iPad because of diagonal length. To put that into perspective, the 7 inch iPad's screen would be smaller than the bottom half of the 10 inch version. Now Steve argues that this is too small to create "great tablet apps" on and that it sacrifices too much of the iPad's screen size and processing power while offering too little of the iPhone's portability.
And yet Jobs has a history of denying the existence of a rumoured product in the run leading up to its announcement, and has done so with almost every major Apple product launch in the last decade. I wouldn't count on this and this alone however - reading Jobs is never as easy as it seems.
To understand why Jobs & Co. may see the 7 inch iPad as a viable product, one must first examine the way in which it might fill a gap in the market. Many people criticised the iPad when it was announced because they decided that there was no gap in the market that it filled - essentially, they said that the void between smartphones and laptops didn't need filling or was already filled by netbooks. Apple proved them wrong, but can it prove to consumers that there is a gap between the 10 inch iPad and the iPhone? Possibly, but it is a difficult task.
The 7 inch iPad would have to be a device that performed certain tasks better than the iPhone and better than the iPad, or perhaps just one that performed them in a similar way but in a more portable enclosure. Unfortunately, most people do not have a 7 inch pocket, and most people do not feel comfortable browsing the web for extended periods on a 7 inch screen. Apple could change all that, or they could decide against introducing a 7 inch iPad. Either way, something tells me that this will not be the last we hear of this mythical beast.
I'm pretty sure that the new ipad will be released, like you said. Steve Jobs announcing that the notion of a seven inch tablet is 'rubbish' is a way of drumming up publicity. I think that It is a good idea as the current ipad, with its brilliant graphics etc, etc, is too big to be that practical... if announced it might include some new features as this is apple taking on the "windows phone 7"
ReplyDeleteMaybe. I would expect it to be very heavily reliant on the already established features of iPad version 1.0
ReplyDeleteIs the "WF7" 7 inches long?
ReplyDelete