14 DAY TRIAL // During Apple’s FY 10 fourth quarter results conference call, chief executive officer, Steve Jobs took the liberty to trash competitors’ business models, while indirectly confirming that Apple has no plans to go below the 10-inch form factor with any upcoming tablet computer.
According to a report by Gizmodo, which contains a transcript of Jobs’ statements during the conference call, Jobs commented on the emerging rival tablets (such as the well known Samsung Galaxy Tab), and downplayed rumors of Apple coming out with a seven-inch rival.
The reason? According to Jobs, 7 inches is too small for such a device.
"This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion,” Jobs reportedly said.
“While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size."
According to the report containing the transcript in question, this acts as a good explanation as to why Apple’s rumored 7-inch device never made it past the testing phase.
"We don't think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen" because it can't "express the software" very well, the transcript goes.
Speaking on behalf of the entire company, the Apple CEO upholds that a "10-inch screen is [the] minimum" for a tablet device, at least in Apple’s view.
There’s even a concern regarding software.
"Software developers aren't gonna deal real well with all these different sized products, when they have to redo their software every time the screen size changes…", Jobs said.
Talking about Research In Motion (RIM), he said:
“We've now passed RIM and I don't see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.”
“They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.”
“I think it's going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform, after iOS and Android. With 300k apps on Apple's app store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb,” Jobs believes.
Jobs actually predicts failure for the iPad's smaller rival tablets, manufactured by companies like Samsung and Dell.
"The current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival," Jobs said. "Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small."
According to a transcript posted by MacDailyNews, Jobs went on to call Google’s Android platform a fragmented mess.
"Google loves to characterize Android as 'open' and iOS and iPhone as 'closed.' We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches,” Jobs said.
“We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google's,” the CEO continued.
“When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants.”
“So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as 'closed,' and we are confident that it'll triumph over Google's fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as 'open,” Apple’s chief executive officer concluded.