• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, July 16, 2012

In the face of mounting competition, Apple is reportedly developing a new iPad with a smaller 7.85-inch screen, and a significantly smaller price tag.
 
“The idea is to help Apple solidify its dominance in the tablet market even as the richest companies in the tech business [Google, Microsoft, and Amazon] are trying to figure out how to outflank Apple,” The New York Times reports.
 
Clearly, “Apple is preparing to extend its dominance of the tablet computer market,” remarks CNNMoney.com.
 
“The device is meant to compete with the latest rivals, which includes Google’s Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the upcoming Microsoft Surface tablet coming out later this year,” writes VentureBeat. “All of that new competition is aimed at dividing the monolithic tablet market into smaller segments.”
 
As The Telegraph notes, scaling the iPad should come very naturally to Apple. In fact, “It adopted a similar approach with the iPod (developing the nano and the shuffle) in order to keep competitors at bay with their own MP3 players.”
 
That said, “Steve Jobs has famously claimed that the iPad has just the perfect screen size, and Apple hasn’t even hinted at a smaller version of the tablet yet, so the ‘iPad mini’ stays deep within rumor territory,” Mashable writes.
 
“At this point, another small iPad rumor may seem underwhelming, and of course it might still turn out to be little more than unfulfilled speculation,” Gizmodo writes. “But, when Bloomberg, the WSJ and the NYT are all reporting the same story from different sources, that's sure as hell a lot of smoke -- we'll just have to wait and see if there's any fire.