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My one cent on Steve Jobs' new job

I am depressed that people are treating him as dead. He will die, of course: all of us will. I guess folks will then recycle what they have said in the past 24 hours. In the meantime, he will be the activist chairman of the board of an amazing company, one where he set the direction and staffed the entire leadership. Apple and Apple's customers are fortunate to have him in that role.

Wanting 5-inch devices

Tim Bray tweets today: "I have high hopes for the about-to-arrive 7" Honeycomb tablets. The original Galaxy Tab remains my face Android device to this day." I have different hopes. I would really like to see 5-inch tablets, which probably means Android and not Apple (although I would be thrilled with the latter). 3-inch tablets like the iPod Touch do not show enough text on the screen to be reasonably useful to me with my middle-aged eyes. 7-inch tablets are too difficult to carry around: there are no pockets that big.

5-inch tablets seem like a sweet spot on the readability-portability scale. The glass is cheap to make (it's one of the standard sizes for GPS units) and they fit in pants pockets. I would not want one as the thing I read books on all the time, but I would certainly appreciate spending a few hundred dollars less than for the 7-inch and 10-inch tablets on something that is used for occasional entertainment and mobile web browsing.