When is 7" better than 10"? When you're a tablet

Spider

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Staff member
Mar 24, 2011
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Summary: Yes, size matters. And sometimes, less is more. When's my Nexus 7 being delivered?

By Christopher Dawson for Googling Google | July 10, 2012 -- Updated 02:31 GMT (19:31 PDT)

I love my new iPad (or iPad 3, or Retina iPad, or whatever it's called). I read on it, watch movies, prototype websites, take videos, edit photos. I'm even sending my Macbook Air to a colleague. It's pretty irrelevant with my iPad. The display's a lot nicer, as well, on the iPad.

That being said, despite Steve Jobs' repeated criticism of 7" tablets as "dead on arrival", every time I use my iPad for extended periods or my younger kids use the 10" bit of Apple shininess, I can't help but think, "Gee, if only this were a little smaller." Yes, it's very thin and sleek, it's light for it's size, and there are countless accessories that position it well for touch-typing or extended viewing, but there's something about the combination of space, size, and weight that make this default choice in tablets less than ideal for many use cases.

I have a Kindle Fire and a Dell Streak, both of which are 7" tablets. I also have a 10" Motorola Xoom. The Fire is great if Amazon's take on Android and their fairly closed ecosystem are your thing. I've passed that on to one of my kids and he loves it. The Dell Streak sits largely unused, stuck in old-Android, orphaned-hardware limbo, which is too bad because the friends, family, and colleagues to whom I've loaned it love the form factor (although it's not exactly a featherweight) and performance. It's a beast, too, in terms of durability (there are no better beta testers for a product's durability than my two-year old daughter or my 18-year old son with Asperger's - if they can't break it, nothing will).

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The Xoom is also an outstanding device and its support for SwiftKey (not available on the iPad) makes it the best touch-typing tablet I've ever used. As a side note, SwiftKey is one paid app for Android that is worth every penny. It's predictive text engine rocks and the split keyboard on the tablet version has to be used to be believed. That said, the Xoom is just too heavy and awkward to make the cut. Put it on a diet, give it a Retina display, and I'd never use my iPad again.

Speaking of high-end Android tablets on a diet, I pre-ordered a Nexus 7. I couldn't resist it. I couldn't resist the call of Jelly Bean and I couldn't resist a 7" form factor with better specs and a full Android interface the the Kindle Fire I'd left behind could't match. Maybe it won't be the tablet holy grail for which I'm looking. I tend to save most of my typing for a computer with a keyboard, but do find myself increasingly creating content on the iPad (both visual and written). Perhaps the smaller size will get in the way of occasional typing and frequent sketching.

I don't think so, though. I'm writing this on a plane right now. It's a nearly three-hour flight from Newark down to New Orleans on a little Embraer sardine can…errr, I mean jet. Not surprisingly, there are more iPads than laptops out on the tiny tray tables. And even these relatively diminutive devices are giving people trouble as other passengers recline, stretch, climb out for bathroom breaks, and pass complimentary beverages back and forth with flight attendants. Now a 7" tablet…

I'm not saying that in two years everyone will be using a 7" tablet, leaving their bulky iPads behind like Apple left the 17" MacBook Pro behind in their latest refresh. It seems pretty clear, in fact, that we'll see both larger and smaller form factors. However, no matter what anyone says, size matters and in ways that you might not expect.

There's a reason that Google's first tablet is a 7" model. Part of it is cost, no doubt. I'd rather have a cheap, fast, small tablet, than a cheap, slow big one. There is also a whole in the tablet market right now that isn't being filled by the Kindle Fire and certainly not by the iPad. A small, high-performance tablet running the latest Android OS and UI has a lot of appeal. At 7", the Nexus 7 may not be the best machine for running Adobe's Touch Apps, but it's small enough to fit in a large pocket, whip out for a fussy kid, or use unobtrusively in a meeting in ways that 10" of iPad isn't.

As tablets continue to push PCs out of the consumer market, we'll see that there is more than enough room for different form factors. My money, though, on the dominant tablet size in 18 months, though, is 7". And even if Apple calls it the iPod Maxi to claim that a 7" iPad is still a bad idea, I think Apple will be right there with a competitive device.
 

Pocket_Fuzz

Member
Jul 13, 2012
2
0
I thought long and hard about my first venture into the tablet world and decided upon the Acer A100. A 7" tablet that so far has been exactly what I needed and fast enough to do what I want as well as having enough icing to make me want to do more with it! Fast processor, great screen, expandable memory well SD card wise anyway, HDMI, Dolby sound, dual cameras and more! So its bigger than a cell phone, but smaller than an IPad and perfect for toting! This is a perfect size for reading as well as updating spreadsheets during field work.

A bit of Pocket fuzz from my A100 using Android Tablet
 

bclinger

Senior Member
Aug 11, 2011
198
14
I started with the A500, purchased the A100 for one of the kids and was impressed by it, both in size, weight and ease of use. Spoke with a Kindle user and from there purchased a second A100 yesterday and used it for work. It handled a 1mb spreadsheet without a problem, connected to the work system without a problem, did email, connected to a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and so forth. So I am now a two tablet user.

Sent from my A100 using Tapatalk
 
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