Why In The Name Of All That Is Wonderful Would You Want A Tablet With A 5″ Screen?
Dell debuted some sort of slate product at CES. At first I was intrigued, and then someone told me the size. Five inch screen. Five inches, people. That’s one and a half inches more than an iPhone. Take your thumbs and index fingers and make a little window with them — you know, like a photographer or director does. That’s about five inches if your hands are at all like mine. Consuming any real amount media- and text-rich content on a device that size sounds about as pleasant as eating glass.
Others, too, are bringing knives to the gun fight. Asus has a 6-inch, full-color e-book reader (why?), and HP is of course collaborating on a medium-sized, mundane tablette with Microsoft, which itself has apparently left the Courier, a genuinely innovative product, on a drawing board somewhere. Haven’t these guys heard of Archos and Viliv? There are already MIDs out there that do essentially what these allegedly next-generation devices are supposed to. The iSlate supposedly has a 10.6-inch screen. Did the competition really think half that would be enough?
