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Steve Jobs Criticizes 7-Inch Tablets, Says 10-Inches Minimum

I prefer a 15 inch, heck a 17 inch tablet (for home), but I saw some demos, and supposedly 7inch is some sort of sweet spot for typing. You can hold it vertically and type with your thumbs.
 
NebulaClash said:
LOL, he just totally dissed all of the coming competitors who went with 7" to save costs and because Apple was sucking up the supply of 10" screens.

How'd you like to be in the final stages of a 7" me-too tablet, and the whole world is about to reprint Steve's diss of the form factor...
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Interesting. It sounds as if Steve is god himself and the masses will do as he says. God said 7 inches is bad, so I will not buy one.
 
inlovewithi said:
I prefer a 15 inch, heck a 17 inch tablet (for home), but I saw some demos, and supposedly 7inch is some sort of sweet spot for typing. You can hold it vertically and type with your thumbs.
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I can already hold my iPad in portrait and type with my thumbs..... I'm quite good at it, and my hands aren't particularly big.
 
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So... If a 7 inch tablet is too small, how can an iPhone be big enough, Steve?
 
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currentinterest said:
He didn't say he was against a 5 inch or 7 inch iPod touch...
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And in your next post you will explain the difference between a 7" iPod Touch and a 7" iPad...
 
Winni said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

So... If a 7 inch tablet is too small, how can an iPhone be big enough, Steve?
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Because an iPhone isn't used as a tablet PC.
 
RedPlanet said:
My take is that the 7 inch itself poses no problem, 3,5 for the iphone does neither. it is the problem of porting 10 inch applications to a 7 inch environment....
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Indeed. It is a different use model, specifically because of screen size.
 
wizard said:
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As a side note iPad sales where worst than I expected. Since shipping delays have disappeared I take that as an indication of market rejection of the device. Or maybe the market has wised up and simply wants a more capable rev two iPad. One thing is obvious iPad can't be blamed for tanking netbook sales anymore.
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It's a supply problem, not a demand problem.
 
man i was hoping for a 7in ipad, the 10in is just to big. I would love a 7in just to take to school. The ipad is to big for me when i can just take my macbook pro.
 
UI physical size

People are such idiots. This is a problem of UI elements. The iPod and iPhone have the same screen size. The introduction of the retina display changes nothing to this. UI elements didn't become smaller, but stayed at the exact same physical size. If you take the iPad and make it 7", then for the first time the UI elements will become smaller.

Button sizes on the iPod/iPhone are made for the physical size. Nothing has changed since the beginning, since 2007. The interface is quite simplistic. But with a 7" iPad button sizes designed for 10" will suddenly become physically smaller. Now this may, or may not be a problem. But remember that the iPad has many different UI elements from the iPod/iPhone. The iPad UI is much denser in controls with some apps.
 
I usually don't like Apples lack of choice when it comes to their products but I think they got it right this time. After picking up an iPad last week after weeks of contemplating about buying one or not, all i can say is that I want a bigger one not smaller haha! But seriously I would prefer to see a 4" iPhone and Touch over a 7' iPad.
 
Maybe its my imagination...

but most EVERYONE wanted a 7'' iPad... the 10" lovers were the less voiced opinion. NOW Steve says down with the 7'' and everyone is humping his slow boat to china...
 
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njean777 said:
man i was hoping for a 7in ipad, the 10in is just to big. I would love a 7in just to take to school. The ipad is to big for me when i can just take my macbook pro.
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If you're in college or high school, you carry a side bag or other pack. If you can't haul 7 lbs of equipment, combined, I question your health.
 
The only thing I was looking forward to in the 7" iPad was a possible retina display. The ipad looks so blurry compared to the iPhone 4.
 
bcaslis said:
I've never understood the requests for a 7". I couldn't see how this would work since with a touch interface (unlike a laptop) you are driven by finger size not pixels. So Jobs comments make perfect sense from that perspective.
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Well, I guess that explains then why the touch interface of the iPhone sucks so badly...
 
mdriftmeyer said:
njean777 said:
man i was hoping for a 7in ipad, the 10in is just to big. I would love a 7in just to take to school. The ipad is to big for me when i can just take my macbook pro.
Click to expand...

If you're in college or high school, you carry a side bag or other pack. If you can't haul 7 lbs of equipment, combined, I question your health.
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Well, njean says he'd rather carry his macbook pro than an iPad -- so, I say, let him. :D Anybody who says the iPad is so big, they might as well carry a laptop, should be forced to walk around campus with a laptop ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE THEY GO for an entire semester. Then we'll lend them an iPad, and let them walk around with it for a day, and we'll see if they still sing the same tune.
 
kdarling said:
Sounds to me like Apple has given up on resolution independence.

Personally, I would look forward to having a 7" tablet (at half the weight of an iPad) to keep by my bed for midnight web surfing. 10" is too big, and 3.5" is too small for this purpose.

All sizes have their places for different people.
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I think Apple have discovered that interfaces work best when crafted (and crafted again) for a specific device size. Infinitely squashy visual elements are one thing, but when you bring touch targets into the mix - I think the idea of resolution independence is even less attractive.

Nokia are aiming to use QT to bring a single executable to all Nokia platforms. (MeeGo and Symbian) regardless of screen resolution or input method.

Any guesses on how well that will work out?

C.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
I think Steve is clueless. He's telling me that an iPhone and an iPod Touch's tiny screen is FINE to run apps on and access the Internet with, but a 7" screen (which is MUCH easier to carry around than a 10" tablet) is too small??? WTF is he smoking?

My problem with the iPad (other than its price considering how cheap Netbooks are that can run the full operating system, not just iOS stuff) is that it's SO BIG that you cannot easily carry it around. If I'm going to carry that in a briefcase or bookbag, I might as well bring a full laptop instead. The great thing about the iPhone/Touch is that you can keep it in your pocket. The thing is that I could easily fit a larger iPhone/Touch than the current model in my pocket and then have all the lovely extra screen space to work with. I don't know if a 7" model would fit in my pocket, but I do know a 10" model isn't going to fit in ANYONE's pocket ever. The thing is just as unwieldy as a netbook.
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Oh for the love of Jeff....

Why are so many people finding a very simple concept so bloody hard to get to grips with. Jobs was talking SPECIFICALY about a tablet form factor, not smartphones. Or, to put it more simply, if you shrink a tablet interface down from (in this case) 10 inches to 7 the reduced screen space makes tapping UI elements accurately problematic at best. The only reason the current Android tablets are getting away with it is they're, basically, phones so you're scaling a smaller interface up to a bigger screen. The instant you try and cram a denser app onto that screen you will run into problems (or have to design the app in such a way as to avoid them at the cost of useability).

It's the same reason why Apple kept all the UI elements the same physical size when they increased the resolution on the latest batch of iOS devices. If they'd kept those elements the same size in terms of pixels it would have made the device impossible to use. It's also the same argument that many of us have been using with regards to putting a full-blown desktop OS like Windows or OS X onto a 10" tablet - UI elements become so small and crowded that there is a significant impact on useability when using fingertips as the primary input method.
 
Spin doesn't help stock price

Samsung Galaxy reviews from Europe say the touchscreen works great and the thing is half the weight of iPad. The stock dropped nearly $20 a share in after hours trading so obviously no one bought Steve's head fake.

The iPad needed iOS 4 in June to stay competitive. The 256MB of RAM may be holding it back compared to iPhone 4's 512MB. Only on the market for 6 months and already completely obsolete.
 
batmccoy said:
:confused: The iPhone is smaller than 7" and there's not much it can't do.

If clicking things is difficult on 7", it must really hard on on a 3.5 inch.
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This occured to me as well, when he claimed that 10" is pretty much the minimum for a touch display to be accurate enough for their needs. :D Most apps on the iPhone have similar layout on the iPad too because devs are lazy.

But I'm happy if they aren't wasting time on a 7" iPad. That never made much sense to me, since I simply don't think that the 10" is too big. And if it isn't, size is always nice. I want in particular a minimum of zooming when reading web pages.
 
The Man said:
Button sizes on the iPod/iPhone are made for the physical size. Nothing has changed since the beginning, since 2007. The interface is quite simplistic. But with a 7" iPad button sizes designed for 10" will suddenly become physically smaller. Now this may, or may not be a problem. But remember that the iPad has many different UI elements from the iPod/iPhone. The iPad UI is much denser in controls with some apps.
Click to expand...

So design the UI elements so they fit on 7" screen then. its not rocket science, android apps already have multiple sized UI elements for different screen sizes and resolutions..

The only reason SJ is dissing 7" tablets is because he didnt come out with it first
 
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