I Want a Stupid 7-inch iPad

David Kaneda:

If you upped the pixel density on a 7-inch iPad (132ppi) to that of a non-Retina iPhone (163 ppi), you get almost the exact same number of pixels. Put it this way: You could double the number of pixels on the current iPad, and still comfortably fit them in a Retina-display, 7-inch iPad. The current iPad’s battery, which constitutes the bulk of it’s weight/size, also lasts much longer than I need. With a smaller display, the loss of any battery space would go unnoticed.

Put me in the camp that thinks a 7-inch iPad is a wonderful idea. But there’s not going to be a Retina Display version any time soon. That would mean the embedded hardware would be pushing nearly the same amount of pixels as the forthcoming 27-inch Cinema Display. It wasn’t all that long ago that we could run a 2048 x 1536 display without a powerhouse video card.

It’s more realistic to expect that the 10 and 7-inch iPads would share the same resolution (1024 x 768). The delta between screen sizes wouldn’t reduce tap targets too dramatically and the display would appear more dense and crisp. It would also have the added bonus of keeping developers from doing more somersaults to support yet another resolution standard, which all of us would appreciate greatly.

Source: 9-bits