Apple's iPad Mini 'announced' (by an official at arch-rival Samsung)
By Eddie Wrenn
Apple are looking at launching an 'iPad Mini' later this year, bringing an eight-inch younger brother into the fold, according to a rumour from a well-placed source. Apple are notoriously secretive about upcoming products, but this leak comes from inside Samsung, a company which holds the unique position of being Apple's fiercest competitor - and one of their biggest hardware suppliers.
The source from within Samsung made the 'mini' indescretion while talking to the Korea Times about how Apple spends £7billion on Samsung components, which go into Apple's iPhones, iPads and MacBooks.
The leaky official said: 'The amount of the current contract [between Apple and Samsung] is around $9.7billion. 'The contract is expected to rise to $11billion by the end of this year as Apple is planning to release a smaller iPad, probably with a 7.85-inch screen, and to sell more of its MacBook Air PCs using Samsung's faster solid state drive (SSD) storage.'
The iPad Mini would add variety to Apple's one-size-fits-all approach, and would be more portable. It will also show that Apple is prepared to break away from former chief exec Steve Jobs' deeply-held mantras.
The Apple leader, who passed away last October, publicly derided the smaller tablet model, in particular the seven-inch form-factor, which is becoming a standard for a smaller tablet.
In a 2010 earnings call, he said: 'One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a ten-inch screen.
'Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. … The reason we won't make a seven-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a lower price point, it's because we think the screen is too small to express the software.'
However a segment of the market is likely to disagree with Jobs, particularly with the rise of the eBook reader and Android tablets which come in all shapes and sizes. Consumers like commuters and travellers will find the size (almost) pocket-friendly, and Google are likely to lead the mainstream acceptance of smaller tablets when they bring out their own seven-inch Android tablet before the summer.
