7-inch tablets may have drawn Steve Jobs? contempt, but they could be a very good thing for consumers.
During Apple?s earnings call yesterday, Apple?s CEO argued forcefully that a 7-inch Android tablet could never compete with Apple?s nearly 10-inch iPad.
?7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,? Jobs said, in an extended thrashing of Apple?s competitors. ?These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA ? dead on arrival.?
What I don?t understand is why that?s necessarily a bad thing for Android or tablet-makers.
If Jobs is right that the 7-inch tablets won?t be able to beat Apple?s iPad on price, that could indeed be a deal-breaker. But the pricing we have seen on smaller Android tablets suggests that they?ll be at least $100 cheaper than the current entry-level iPad, even without a data plan. If they?re sold with data plans and carrier subsidies like smartphones, they could be even cheaper than that.
Lower cost isn?t the only appeal of going small. 7-inch tablets are lighter than 10-inch devices. They?re infinitely easier to hold in one hand. They?re easier to type on with two hands (particularly if you have small hands). They fit into smaller bags. And you use them to do different things.
Really, a 7-inch tablet is closer to an e-reader, a personal media player or a handheld gaming device than the iPad is. It?s no coincidence that most e-readers, such as the Kindle and Sony Reader Daily Edition, have 6- or 7-inch screens: That?s about the size of a paperback book.
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