United Daily News, a Taiwanese newspaper is reporting that Apple has received samples of 7.85-inch screens with a resolution of 1024×768. The manufacturers sending these samples were AU Optronics and LG Display. Apple plans to ship the new “iPad mini” sometime early next year.
First off, this would be an interesting challenge for application developers, who are currently developing for the iPad, seeing as the display currently used for the device has a screen resolution of 1024×768. This wouldn’t be a problem on this new device, considering they would have the same screen resolution. That said, with the smaller screen size, the tap targets would also be smaller. This means some adjustments would be required on the part of the developer.
Of course, there are also long-standing rumors that Apple will be releasing a new “Retina” display iPad this spring with a resolution of 2048×1536. This new, smaller iPad, with the same resolution as the current model, could potentially also be labeled as “Retina”, while also offering a lower price-point offering in the iPad family. Just maybe.
With all of that said, I don’t believe this one will pan out. Apple will go bigger with the iPad, not smaller. Unlike Samsung, who seems to be releasing new sized tablets every week, Apple did all of their size testing internally, and found that the current-sized iPad is the one that needed to ship. The rest of the sizes failed internally, and thus, would likely fail in the marketplace. Besides, if you made smaller version of the iPad, you would begin to encroach on iPod touch/iPhone territory of devices.
So, as of the moment, I’m going to say “no” on this one. It doesn’t make sense when you look at Apple’s broader movements.
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TAGS: ipad mini
