It seems unlikely to me that Apple won't make more than one model of iPad, sooner or later. They have always had different sizes of tower models, of iMacs, and of notebooks, heck, even two different lines of notebooks, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. And I wouldn't seem like them to not take the opportunity to consolidate the huge success they have right now. Different customers have different needs after all, and why should they leave some of those customers to the Android platform?
What would it be though? Even though Jobs has poo-poo'd tablets smaller than ten inches, he has been known to do that about things Apple were not quite ready to present yet*. So personally I would hope for two or three different sizes. Like a 6, a 10, and a 15-inch model. Or perhaps just a 6- and a 12-inch model. (I'm taking about diagonal screen size, of course.)
A big iPad is just a must for serious reading of books with graphics. It really is. Technical books, art books, comic books, etc.
A smaller one... I dunno if they will do it. Perhaps just a larger iPhone... but I just really love the super-handy size and weight of the Kindle 3 (it's pocketable), and I would love to have an iPad with a high-rez screen in that size and weight. The iPhone 4 is surprisingly usable as an ereader because of the high screen resolution (super-sharp text), and that screen is only a 3.5 incher! Perhaps a 5-inch iPhone? I dunno, until the day we have screens which fold or roll out, there'll always be compromises here.
Oh, an iPad with a really good camera would be interesting, composing on a large screen would be like using an old-time large-format camera. Maybe the could avoid the thickness issue by letting the lens look 90 degrees through a mirror, some compact cameras have done that.
Whatever happens, it'll prolly be weally weally kewl.
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*Much as I admire Jobs, his statement that 7-inch tablets are all but unusable "unless you file down your fingers" is silly. This would make the much smaller iPhone unusable for anything but as a phone, and it clearly isn't, it's used for thousands of things.
2 comments:
I think we will see a larger iPod touch this Fall. It's hard to predict how big the screen will be on such a device: 4 or 5 inches maybe.
I agree with you that Apple is way too shy about putting good still cameras into their devices, iPod touch in particular.
Eolake said...
"A big iPad is just a must for serious reading of books with graphics. It really is. Technical books, art books, comic books, etc."
Funny...I was just thinking of this, today; how nice it would be to have such a thing, someday. :-)
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