Capturing the Rest: The 7 Inch iPad

There’s a lot of talk lately about an upcoming 7 inch iPad from Apple. I think the pundits are having a hard time wrapping their minds around this because it doesn’t seem to have a place in the Apple product family. After all, Apple makes small phones and large tablets. They don’t make large phones and small tablets. I think the point is that the pundits are not the target audience for this device. If Apple were to make the 7 inch iPad – I think they will – it would be primarily for those people not willing to plunk down $500 for an iPad. There are a lot of those people and right now their only option is a competing operating system. Don’t you think a company so willing to jump into the meat grinder of patent litigation with its competitors to keep them out of the marketplace would also release a product that could be so much more effective at capturing market and mindshare?

I think a 7 inch iPad in the $250 price range, along with the app store and all the other great things that Apple has built, would be devastating to competing tablet manufacturers. Apple employed a similar strategy in the iPod market and the rest of the MP3 player market never recovered. I don’t know whether Apple calls it the next generation iPod touch or the iPad Mini but the result would be the same either way, a lot of units sold to customers that would otherwise have gone to Amazon, Samsung, and others.

Scanner Pro 4.1

In the running battle for iOS scanning supremacy, today Readdle released Scanner Pro 4.1. The interface overhaul is now complete and I like it. The grid lines in camera mode help me square the document and it runs its very own stability check when you snap the picture. Moreover, it now syncs everything between your devices with iCloud. With this update (along with the recent iPad optimized version), Scanner Pro has officially replaced JotNot in my life.

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My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

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Let’s Fix America

Happy 4th of July. I still find it remarkable that, in 1776, a group of colonial upstarts decided to take on what was then a global superpower. As we sit here in 2012, I think our republic is in jeopardy. No longer are the people in control. Money is. I’m a Rootstriker. In addition to having fun today, I ask that everyone visit Rootstriker.org and consider joining. Whether you are a hippy-liberal or die-hard conservative (and especially if you fall in the middle), getting control of our democracy should be important to you.