Contrary to a lot of opinions, I think the 7" form factor is actually pretty interesting. I find the iPad large enough that I often just reach for my Macbook Air because it's far more useful and not really much larger.
But something closer to the size of a book is less cumbersome and more comfortable for reading and browsing, which is what I'm doing with a tablet 90% of the time anyway.
I'm going to go out on a limb a bit here and predict that Apple will regret ignoring this segment and that they're going to eventually have to shake up their developer tooling to deal with varying form factors.
I had the original 7 Galaxy Tab and absolutely loved it. I have Transformer Prime now and consider getting this smaller tablet again because the 7 inch form factor is absolutely perfect imo.
I also think the size is an advantage for a whole bunch of use cases.
I don't have a tablet right now, but I do have a Kindle. I think it's about the same size as the Nexus 7. I find it to be very convenient: I can easily hold it with just one hand when I'm laying on the bed, it fits into my tiny laptop bag and I can even put it in a coat pocket (great for commuting by train). Anything bigger would be less convenient.
It's hard to build a single device that suits all these use cases equally well. That's why I think in the long run all the big players are going to have to support multiple formats.
I completely agree with you. For something that would use Google currents, I can see myself using a 7-inch tablet. But I think it's going to be quite a while till everyone supports reflowable PDFs.
I don't see PDFs running away anytime soon, unless someone comes with a better format that can support print and screen simultaneously.
I use Latex, and with some tinkering you can render your documents to both PDF and epub. The problem would be with designers and people working with tools that are not as flexible as Latex.
I've found an even better solution for my LaTeX documents: I have several different sty files for different screen sizes. However, critically, they all generate PDFs. Why? Basically, it looks much better than an epub file (at least on my Kindle). The text is justified properly, it uses a nicer typeface and math looks great (actually, I have no idea of what math looks like in epub form).
Also, (once again Kindle-specific), epubs are bad for languages that are not English. Particularly, I'm thinking about Russian: I have some Russian books in epub and they look horrible. The problem is that words are never broken between two lines which leads to an absurdly jagged margin. Since Russian often has longer words than English, this is actually a big problem. I think something like TeX's automatic hyphenation would make the experience much better.
However, generating epub files also seems like it has merit. I'll have to try it some day. Is there some special tool that just extracts the content but not the style information, or do you have a special style for epub files? It would also be great if you could provide some relevant links.
Nit: It's 16:10, but I agree that 4:3 is a great aspect ratio for tablets, especially if it is being used for reading. I really wish there were more 4:3 tablets around.
I really like the 4:3 ratio on my 8 inch Vizio tablet; so much so that I've been avoiding upgrading to Honeycomb. Android 3's onscreen toolbar would definitely throw off the usable aspect ratio.
PDF is a pain to read on the majority of mobile devices. Even Kindle. Its lack of reflowing makes it impossible to adapt to various smaller screen sizes and efficiently use screen space and change text size. It's becoming a real pain point.
Haha, true, though at least on my laptop I can full-screen it zoom the content to the screen edges, and invert the colors to get dark bg/light text. It's at least serviceable that way. Nothing like it (or at least that easy) on Kindle, Android, etc. that I know of.
Agree. 7" is the best size for a tablet. It's really portable, very handy. If I were to buy a larger tablet, something like Surface with its fancy keyboard cover is far more appealing than a tablet that is only partially functional.
But something closer to the size of a book is less cumbersome and more comfortable for reading and browsing, which is what I'm doing with a tablet 90% of the time anyway.
I'm going to go out on a limb a bit here and predict that Apple will regret ignoring this segment and that they're going to eventually have to shake up their developer tooling to deal with varying form factors.