Another Taiwan publication is saying that a 7-inch iPad is coming. This rumor isn’t new. In truth, it was among the many first rumored sizes. It echoes the always-unreliable Digitimes and iLounge’s latest reports, but is it really possible?

iLounge recently claimed that a ” highly reliable source” told them of a 7-inch iPad in addition to ” news” of an antenna-fixed iPhone 4-coming out as early as January 2010. Additionally they mentioned an iPod touch with a smaller screen than the iPhone. Back in early 2010, iLounge’s original Apple tablet rumors said that Apple was preparing a 7-inch tablet. At the top, though, they backpedaled, saying that Apple thought a 7-inch screen was too small, and that that Steve Jobs & Co. decided on a 10.7-inch iPad instead.

The iPad’s screen size is 9.7 inches.

Likewise, Digitimes has been banging the 7-inch iPad drum for ages. Unlike the commercial Daily News-which points at an IPS display-Digitimes said the screen is OLED. It’s highly unlikely that Apple will use OLED for anything, given the success of their IPS Retina display and that that’s impossible to get OLED screens inside the massive quantities Apple would want. The commercial Daily News claims this ” iPad 2″ is coming for the holiday season. Now that could be a Christmas surprise.

Why a smaller iPad?

Proponents of this rumor say that taking place to seven inches will probably make the iPad lighter. In addition they say it’ll be cheaper to make and that Apple wants to keep control of the market they created by offering more flavors.

But we know that Apple has tried different formats for the iPad before determining the 9.7 inch form factor. There’s nothing wrong with that format. If anything, it’s too small for reading things like comic books. But it surely feels good to address, and has ended in more than three million units sold in very little time (when everyone except a few predicted its catastrophic failure).

It doesn’t make sense to modify the winning formula with a screen on the way to be too small for comfortable reading, while being just double the dimensions of an iPod. And the market doesn’t seem sufficiently big yet to have space for one more flavor.

At this point, the only real thing that the iPad needs is a much better resolution screen at an analogous 9.7-inch size. We’re going to probably see this when version 2 is released-probably in a year from now.

Could the rumor be true?

Could the rumor reposted by PC World be true? Who knows. It doesn’t seem particularly reasonable to me and Taiwanese newspapers have a history of posting false tech industry stories about Apple products so one can boost the reputation of component manufacturers. Jointly, the actual providers are extremely strict about secrecy because their contracts with Apple rely on it.

Like with every Apple rumor-especially within the summer-it’s better to be highly skeptical until an Apple spokesperson actually confirms it. [PC World]

Source

This post is tagged: fit, inches, magic, rumors