I'd like to comment on the avalanche of tablets poised to enter the market in the coming months.

First, it appears to be just a handful of credible entrants, not exactly an avalanche.

Second, almost all of them use 7 inch screens, as compared to iPads almost 10 inch screen. Let's start there. One naturally thinks that a 7 inch screen offers 70% of the benefits of a 10 inch screen. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so the 7 inch screen is only 45% as large as iPads 10 inch screen. If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view, and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the 7 inch tablets are a bit smaller then the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size. Apple has done extensive user testing on touch user interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap flick or pinch them. This is one of the key reason we think 10 inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.

Third, every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smart phone. It's ease of fitting into your pocket or purse, it's unobtrusiveness when used in a crowd. Given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pockets, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in our pockets is clearly the wrong tradeoff. The 7 inch tablets are tweeners, too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.

Fourth, almost all of these new tablets use Android software, but even Google is telling the tablet manufacturers not to use their current release, Froyo, for tablets and to wait for a special tablet release next year. What does this mean when your software supplier says not to use their software in your tablet, and what does it mean when you ignore them and use it anyway.

Fifth, iPad now has over 35,000 apps on the app store. This new crop of tablets will have near zero.

And sixth and last, our potential competitors are having a tough time coming close to iPads pricing, even with their far smaller, far less expensive screens. The iPad incorporates everything we've learned about building high value products, from iPhones, iPods, and Macs. We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything. And this results in an incredible product at a great price. The proof of this will be in the pricing of our competitors products, which will likely offer less for more.

These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7 inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small, and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7 inch bandwagon with an orphaned product. Sounds like lots of fun ahead.