Jobs Blasts 7-inch iPad Rivals

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the opportunity to blast Apple competitors today and dismissed the avalanche of 7-inch iPads on the way from other brands as “dead on arrival.”

Signaling that Apple may not offer a 7-inch iPad any time soon, Jobs called 7-inch tablets “tweener” products that are too small to compete with 10 inch tablets and too large to match the more pocketable smartphones.

On a conference call with analysts late Monday, he said, “We wouldn’t make a 7-inch tablet because we don’t think you can make a great tablet with a 7-inch screen. It’s too small to express the software that people want to put on these things…” He said tablet makers should hand out sandpaper with the devices because consumers will need to make their fingers smaller because icons will appear too close together on a 7-inch screen.

Jobs accused competitors of trying to compete with Apple’s aggressive tablet prices through small screens and slower processors and said developers are not going to rush to dumb down their apps for such devices.

“We think the current crop [of tablets] will be DOA…they will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small…sounds like a lot of fun ahead.”

He noted that many tablets will use Android’s Froyo and that Google itself has stated that Froyo is not suited to tablets.. “What does it mean when your supplier says not to use their software in your tablet and you ignore that,” Jobs asked.

A 7-inch screen, when measured diagonally is really 45 percent the size of the iPad’s almost 10 inch screen, he noted.

He also lit into Android phones for being too fragmented. He said a Twitter client—TwitterDeck–recently launched an Android app and had to contend with more than 100 different forms of Android.

When it comes to the iPhone, Jobs acknowledged that Android beat Apple in the June quarter on the number of phones shipped although he noted that the iPhone at the time, was in transition to iPhone 4. He’s awaiting the next quarterly results from analysts such as Gartner to learn how the iPhone competed subsequently.

Source: CEoutlook

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