Tablets, phablets and the squeezing effect

“With the smartphone sizes growing, the squeezing effect among sizes should first take place in the small-sized 8 inch tablet market. Taking the 6.3-inch for example, the 7-inch tablet’s viewing area is only 23% larger, and the small difference makes the 7-inch tablet in an awkward position," he said.

"Contrarily, the 8-inch has a 61% larger viewing area than the 6.3-inch, allowing more comfort when either reading or video watching. The much clearer segmentation can naturally ease the spreading fire brought by the phablet.”

WitsView says that the 8-inch tablet market will remain in the “design-in phase” for the first half of this year, but expects the screen size to take a 11.9% stake in the 7 inch tablet market by the end of 2013 as models come from Samsung (which has already announced the Galaxy Note 8.0), Acer, HP, Lenovo and Asus.

The research firm isn't the first to hail 2013 as the year for tablets 8-inches and below. Creative Strategies’ Ben Bajarin noted at the TabletBiz conference that 2013 would see people “standardizing on smaller form factors", views which have since been echoed by a number of other industry observers.

Moor Insights & Strategy principal Patrick Moorhead even added that the move to smaller devices could be good for notebook makers, while IDC recently said that 2013 will just be the start for the smaller tablet. While there's a greater than good chance Microsoft is developing its own smaller version of the Surface tablet, Acer's leak has anything from Microsoft beat out of the gate.fdfRFE23s

Acer may soon offer up the first 8-inch Windows 8 tablet, a q88 tablet device dubbed the Iconia W3.This is according to Minimachines.net (Google translated) which posted an army of images purportedly of the unannounced device.