A well known Taiwanese race car driver celebrity claims that he has a prototype 7 inch iPad.
Steve Jobs has said "7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad ... These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival". He argued that the only reason competitors are building them is because they can't match the price point of the $499 iPad with a 10 inch screen.
So is the the Taiwan 7 incher a fake? No one really knows or until Apple does a "Gizmodo stolen iPhone" thing again.
Many people have asked why doesn't Apple doesn't build a 7 inch model (in spite of Jobs comments) and stated that they might actually be interested in buying one.
One hint of why 7 inches might not be an idea and echoing Jobs comments is Gizmodo's review of the 7 inch Samsung Galaxy Tab:
“Videos do look better than they do on a phone, but a bigger tablet would be even better….
There is no way to not feel like a total dorkface while typing on this thing. In portrait, it’s like tapping on a massive, nerdy phone. In landscape, it’s just dumb. You still have to thumb type, only you’re stretching out further, and text entry swallows up the entire screen. Swype might be dandy on a phone, but on a seven-inch screen it doesn’t work so well—you have to travel a lot further to sketch out words. In other words, you get the worst of a phone’s input problems—amplified…..
“… This thing is just a mess. It’s like a tablet drunkenly hooked up with a phone, and then took the fetus swimming in a Superfund cleanup site. The browser is miserable, at least when Flash is enabled. It goes catatonic, scrolling is laggy, and it can get laughably bad. When better browsing is half the reason to go for a larger screen, that’s insanity…
“… Typically, the point of a compromise is to bring together the best of both sides. The Tab is like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all of the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits. ”
There is no way to not feel like a total dorkface while typing on this thing. In portrait, it’s like tapping on a massive, nerdy phone. In landscape, it’s just dumb. You still have to thumb type, only you’re stretching out further, and text entry swallows up the entire screen. Swype might be dandy on a phone, but on a seven-inch screen it doesn’t work so well—you have to travel a lot further to sketch out words. In other words, you get the worst of a phone’s input problems—amplified…..
“… This thing is just a mess. It’s like a tablet drunkenly hooked up with a phone, and then took the fetus swimming in a Superfund cleanup site. The browser is miserable, at least when Flash is enabled. It goes catatonic, scrolling is laggy, and it can get laughably bad. When better browsing is half the reason to go for a larger screen, that’s insanity…
“… Typically, the point of a compromise is to bring together the best of both sides. The Tab is like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone. It has all of the input problems of a tablet, with almost none of the consumption benefits. ”
There are positive reviews of the Galaxy Tab of course but the Gizmodo review paints a pretty grim picture of why 7 inches might not be that great (key board wrong size, screen too small for tablet use etc) as Steve Jobs says. On the other hand Samsung announced the Tab is selling well hitting the million mark in two months ( perhaps as polls indicate to previous Samsung users and in areas where the iPad is not available and maybe to people who just want a big phone).
So will Apple build one? Who can say for certain, Jobs might change his mind, but then again although he was lambasted for years by critics for not building a netbook (at that time the fastest growing PC category) he stuck to his guns saying netbook keyboards were too cramped etc and look now at collapsing growth in netbook sales vs the astounding rise of iPad.
