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| The Note rocks. If only it ran iOS... |
[Update: more experts are weighing in, supporting this.]
Barclays Expects 5” iPhablet Late 2013, Early 2014, article
Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes told his clients on Monday to expect Apple to release a 5-inch iPhone—or iPhablet—in either the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014. He said that the form factor is popular enough that Apple will not be able to ignore it.
[...] "Apple has stood firm that its iPhone is ideal for one-handed use, which is true in our opinion. However, one handed use is arguably less important as phone calls become less and less crucial - the larger form factor has caught on for navigation, texting, videos, books and web access."
Indeed. I am surprised it is taking Apple this long to realize this, I've said for over four years that the iPod Touch and the iPhone are simply too small to be very useful for anything but phone calls and the simplest of apps. (There are very few web sites which I'm able to read or use on an iPhone.) And the Samsung Galaxy Note, now well over a year old, made it abundantly clear to anybody who has tried it (has Apple?) that two more inches makes a world of difference (it's double the area).
Jobs of course said that 7-inch tablets are not useful, "unless you include a file to make your fingertips slimmer". Jobs had opinions, many of them, and very, very strong ones. And he never changed them, until suddenly he had, and then the new belief was his own, and he had always had it. And some of his beliefs, inevitably, were not well founded. I think this is a good example. If the iPhone is useful, and the 10-inch iPad is useful, by what kind of logic would sizes in between those two not be useful? Sorry, it makes no sense at all.
The near-8-inch iPad Mini, the 10-inch iPad, the 3.5(4)-inch iPhone regular, and a 5 or 5.5-inch iPhone Deluxe would together make for a strong line which covers about everything. (Until the day we really need large tablets, but I think that's a minority market for now.)
1 comment:
"And he never changed them, until suddenly he had, and then the new belief was his own, and he had always had it."
"Strong beliefs, weakly held" can be called a valid or useful survival mechanism for changing times.
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