“That’s the theory, but does it work for practical applications? Below are a few screengrabs from my iPad that have been shrunk down and then padded back out. If you load this page on a 10′ iPad, you’ll find each of the below images should come out exactly 7.85′ across the diagonal — emulating how they would look on an ‘iPad mini’. This will let you get a feel for how small those buttons get.
(Note that the resizing process has made things look a bit fuzzy. This wouldn’t happen on a real iPad mini, so please just overlook that.)”
(Via. http://seveneightyfive.fscked.com/)
So I noted a few days ago that this rumored 7-inch iPad would be more cramped than people imagine, and that the only true way to test this theory out was to print out some interfaces from the iPad at that size, stick them onto a hard surface, and tap around to get a feel for just how tight the screen elements would be.
Richard Gaywood hasn’t done quite that, but he has done the next best thing: he’s made some screenshots of common iPad apps and resized them to the correct size so that they would be at “scale” on a full-sized iPad. In other words, click on the linked article above from your current iPad and check out the linked images. Not a perfect test, but a pretty good approximation of the size of elements in relation to one another, at least.
The shortcomings of this test? Well, you’re still holding a full-sized iPad, so your hands are further away from the targets than they would be when holding the device. And the weight is obviously heavier than a smaller iPad would be. And the resolution makes things look fuzzy, so you have to take the fuzzy factor out of your bias. And finally, he cherry-picked the apps a bit and in my opinion picked rather sparse user interfaces. Even the shot from Garageband, which is a pretty feature-rich app, is a shot of the guitar interface, which is more spaced out than a lot of other views in Garageband.
Having said all that, I have to say that the first thing I thought when looking at these images was “is this really the correct size?” 7.85″ is a heck of a lot different from 7 inches. This is not anywhere near as small as the Kindle Fire or the Galaxy Nexus. That .85 inches is a big difference. It just doesn’t feel that much smaller at all than the full-sized iPad.
7 inches sounds like 3 inches smaller than the 10-inch iPad. But when you look at the actual numbers of 7.85 and 9.7 (the current iPad’s size), the difference is a lot closer to 2 inches than 3. In fact, it’s less than 2 inches difference.
And that leads me to two new conclusions:
First, I was wrong; regular iPad apps on this thing will probably be okay for the most part. I think there will be the odd app here and there that will have to rework the UI a bit, but most apps really will work just fine smaller, as far as I can tell.
Second, why not just make all iPads this size? Seriously, if they were able to make a Retina version of this (which they should, since it’s the same density as the iPhone Retina screen), they should just make all iPads 7.85 inches moving forward. Unless the battery life tradeoff is too much to bear, which is entirely possible. At the very least, though, the 7.85-inch should render the last-gen but still shipping iPad 2 obsolete. There’s no reason for a full-sized non-retina iPad to exist once this thing enters the picture. Unless there are more limitations in the smaller device other than form factor that I’m not seeing, such as wanting to drive the cost down with slower processors, cheaper components, etc.
And that remains the bigger question. I don’t know how something this big will be so much cheaper to make. Seems like almost the same amounts of aluminum and glass involved, and the internals can’t be that much cheaper if they go slower or add a little less RAM. So the price of this is probably going to be closer to $299 than $199. That’s enough to tempt a lot of users away from a Nexus, maybe, but it’s also plenty to kill off the more profitable iPad2. Why would Apple want to do that, unless they were truly scared of that Nexus actually building traction? I just don’t see that happening.
So there are still some missing puzzle pieces here. But we’re getting closer.
