The Rumored 7.85-inch iPad Stacked Up Against Other 7-Inch Tablets

The speculation over a smaller iPad is increasing with every passing day, so much so that the 4-inch iPhone seems to have been pushed into the background.

Most of the discussion is around how current iPad apps, made for the 9.7" screen would scale down to the rumored 1024 x 768 pixels 7.85 inches screen of the iPad mini.

So, how can we square the idea of Apple making an iPad Mini with Jobs’s remarks from just a year and a half ago? We could point out that 7.85 inches is closer to 8 inches than 7, and that the exact size of the purported iPad Mini display offers 66 percent of the surface area of a 9.7-inch iPad, not 45 percent. We could point out that, assuming Apple-recommended 44-point user interface tap targets on a display with 163 points per inch, it should offer tap targets of the exact same physical size as every iPhone made to date, thus avoiding the need for Apple to include sandpaper with the device.

Steve Jobs famously dismissed a screen measuring 7 inches diagonally as being too small, with the screen area being less than half of the real estate on 10 inch screens. As John Gruber notes, by simply increasing less than an inch diagonally, the screen real estate jumps to 66 percent of what is available on the current 9.7 inch iPad. He writes:



Richard Gaywood put together a nice collection of images of iOS apps that, on an iPad, measure exactly 7.85 inches diagonally, giving an indication of how big the iPad mini's screen would really be.



(Click on the image for the original version of the image)

Another great image, created by Twitter user @trojankitten, compares the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire, both measuring 7 inches diagonally, against the 7.85 inches iPad mini. The iPad mini's screen size turns out to be more than 35 percent larger than the other 7 inch tablets currently available in the market.