[benhalllondon]

A finger is an essentially fat stylus, the raw space that your finger hits on the screen is always (say) .5cm x .5cm or so.

It doesn't matter what the resolution screen your finger touches that size is always the same. So Apple defined that no touch interaction should be less than 44x44 points. And then points map to pixels in different ratios depending on dpi etc.

Jobs was saying that on a smaller screen you either have a smaller number of touchable areas or you get small fingers and reduce the 44x44 points number.

[Kliment]

So he's suggesting you sand your fingertips down? That's a really unpleasant image. The palm of my hand once had minor interaction with a belt sander, it was not fun.

[ZeroGravitas]

Though just to be clear, his comment makes absolutely no sense, since he was already at that point selling a 3.5" tablet, a quarter of the size of a 7" tablet, with no sandpaper required.

[snowwrestler]

Don't know why you are getting voted down, you're exactly correct. The iPod Touch and iPhone are basically 3.5" tablets.

[czr80]

Yes, but they run iPhone apps. Jobs' point was that you wouldn't want to run iPad apps on a 7" screen - if you tried to fit in the extra information you can show on an iPad into a smaller space that would make the touch targets too small.

So now the proposition is that actually you can make an iPad layout fit in a ~8" screen because the iPad touch targets are a bit bigger than an iPhone anyway, and so you can shrink them a bit (to exactly iPhone size, it turns out) and they will work okay. We'll see.