Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/05/third_of_ipad_owners_want_smaller_tablets/

Third of iPad owners want smaller slabs

But only one in five of all tablet owners do

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 5th September 2012 09:32 GMT

Market watcher Strategy Analytics has been asking iPad owners about their desires for the platform and found that a third of them want a tablet with a different size screen.

That said, the current size remains the favourite for the majority of users, and that remains the case when owners of other tablets were questioned too: most prefer the 10in form-factor.

Of all those tablet owners asked - some 923 folk in the UK, US, Germany, France, China and Japan - only 20 per cent said they would rather have a 7in device.

So has Apple "correctly targeted the most preferred screen size with its initial 10 inch iPad offerings", as SA suggests - or did its choice of screen size define the ideal in the mind of punters? We'll probably never know, but the research does show there's a clear, if small, demand for an 'iPad Mini'.

Good job, then, Apple is about to launch one.

Still, demand for seven-inchers - at least on the basis of the SA sample - isn't perhaps as strong as some observers have suggested. That implies that the success of the 7in Amazon Kindle Fire and, more recently, the similarly sized Google Nexus 7 is more a result of low pricing than a compact form-factor. ®