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back to article Apple 'prepping smaller iPad'

Apple may be prepping a smaller, lower-cost iPad, perhaps as both a defensive parry to Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire and a less-pricey offering to cost-conscious emerging markets. Such are the conclusions to be drawn from a report on Tuesday that both Taiwan's AU Optronics and Korea's LG Display have provided Apple with 7.85-inch …

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  1. uhuznaa

    Easy enough

    Apple could easily take the iPod touch and scale it up from 3.5" to 7". Larger battery, larger screen, same innards, same resolution, same software. 960x640 on 7" is still a higher pixel density than the 10" iPad with 1024x768. There're plenty of apps running on that "retina" resolution and even if the UI elements would appear much larger than on the iPhone or iPod touch it would be perfectly usable. And cheap, because just a larger screen with the same amount of pixels and a larger battery with a new case aren't that expensive. With the iPod touch at $199 you could sell this with a similar margin for $249 or less.

    On the other hand scaling the 10" iPad down with a smaller screen and battery wouldn't make it much cheaper and all the UI elements in the apps would shrink to nearly unusable absolute sizes. Idiotic idea, actually.

    But Apple is between a rock and a hard place here. An iPad mini would be easy and would sell not too bad, but it would very much look like the start of what nearly doomed Apple the last time: Sprawling products to cover a market at all angles.

    I'm sure they have production-quality prototypes of both approaches, but I'm also sure they will wait this out for a while.

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  2. Andy 97
    Joke

    Blimey, Steve's only been dead for a couple of weeks...

    Whatever next?

    Flash on iOS 5?

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  3. paulc

    He's right about finger tips being a limit...

    I have an Arnova 7 2G and find it problematic opening links on web pages and generally have to zoom in to successfully "click" a small link.

    My daughter has an iPad 2 and web browsing is far easier on that.

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    1. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
      Reply Icon

      True

      But a 10 inch is a PITA to lug along.

      And reading a PDF document on a smart mobile phone is a PITA as well.

      I'm not sure, but a 7 inch may be a good compromise, or it may well harbour the worst of both worlds, sort of like an iMac... (y'know, not a desktop, not a lappie, complete utter rubbish).

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    What's to say...

    that it signals a smaller iPad? It could be a bigger iPod Touch...

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