Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 14:41
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
As iTWire's
Stan Beer said earlier today, "It's hard to imagine - especially given Steve Jobs' statements - that Apple will come out with a netbook that directly competes with the offerings of Asus, Acer and others."
Having
hired former IBM employee Mark Papermaster as senior vice president of devices hardware engineering (ie, the head honcho of iPod and iPhone hardware development) and
acquired low-power PowerPC chip designer PA Semi, it wouldn't be at all surprising if the 'devices' family was to grow in number or in size.
Sure, such speculation could well prove to be a case of thinking that one plus one plus one equals a lot more than 3.
Consider a device with a 7in diagonal screen. That's twice the size of the iPod touch's but - with the same number of pixels per inch - has a resolution of 960 by 640.
Many web designers assume a minimum screen size of 1024 by 768 unless they're specifically catering for mobile devices, and that would only require scaling to slightly under 95 percent to fit across this hypothesised Apple screen.
And enlarging the display would make it much easier to use the soft keyboard whether the device was in landscape or portrait mode. It still wouldn't be ideal for substantial amounts of text entry, but it might lead to less-terse emails and forum posts.
Apple already has the infrastructure in place to sell software through the App Store, and there are a whole bunch of developers that already have a running start.
What are the other issues? Please
read on.
