by “Apple knew what I wanted even before I did.”
For fans of Apple, iPads, and shiny, beepy things, the arrival of the iPad mini is cause for celebration–and that’s before we’ve actually gotten our hands on the thing. Steve Jobs famously said that Apple wouldn’t get into the small-tablet market, and yet here we are just a few short years later with a small iPad seemingly targeted at consumers eyeing the likes of Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindles.
Of course in typical Apple style, they’ve put their own Cupertino spin on a small tab. It’s not a 7-inch screen, but 7.9, and the 4:3 aspect ratio bucks the trend toward tablet screens proportioned like your 16:9 television–and gives you more usable space.
Design
Picking up the iPad mini for the first time, what’s so striking is how small and light it really is. Sure, it’s called “mini,” so you should know what you’re getting, but it’s the kind of thing that you almost have to hold for yourself to really appreciate.
The iPad mini comes in white & silver, or black & slate, the same color schemes Apple introduced with the iPhone 5. The front sports a very thin colored bezel (more on that in a bit), and the back is clad in silver or slate aluminum.
Buttons and ports are fairly standard for an iPad. To the right of the screen, the slim, slightly rounded edge features the mute/orientation-lock switch, and separate buttons for Volume Up and Down. The left edge is left clean, which makes it the ideal connection point for the newly redesigned Smart Cover. Up top is the Sleep/Wake button on the right, and the headphone jack on the left with a small mic in the middle. The bottom edge features the Lightning connector for charging and syncing, and a vent holes for the pair of speakers tucked inside.
The mini is the first iPad you can comfortably hold in one hand. Keeping a firm grip requires curling your thumb around the device. With the thinner bezel, you might think this would cause some problems with the digitizer picking up errant taps, but according to Apple, iOS 6 has been tweaked to prevent that.
In practice, it works well. As long as your fingers don’t stray too far toward the center of the screen, the iPad mini doesn’t seem to mind extra fingers around the edges. Pinching, zooming, tapping and other gestures worked fine, even with our thumb crossing over the border into active screen territory.
Compromises
The $329 starting price for the 16GB WiFi-only model is also new. It still comes in higher than some competitors–Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD both sell for $199, and the 8.9-inch Fire is $299. But the price is significantly lower than both the new fourth-gen iPad, and even the similarly spec’d iPad 2, which Apple continues to sell for $399.
While everyone would love to see an iPad mini with Retina display, this time around, the mini comes with a 1024×768 screen, giving it the same resolution as the original iPad and the iPad 2. So if you’re hell-bent on a high-res mini, save yourself the anguish and hang tight for the iPad mini 2 that Apple will probably release next year.
While the idea of buying a device with an “outdated” screen may turn off those who insist on having only the latest kit, the iPad mini does have an advantage over its similarly equipped sibling iPad 2. At 9.7 inches, the 1024×768 iPad 2 has 132 pixels per inch of screen space. Shrink that screen down to the mini’s 7.9 inches, and that pixel density rises to a respectable 163 ppi.
If you’ve been using a third-gen iPad, or you already upgraded to the latest iPad that was released alongside the mini (see pTK), the screen is a far cry from the current Retina display. 264 ppi is a big jump in resolution, and looking at the iPad mini, it shows. That said, when compared to an original iPad or the iPad 2, the mini’s denser pixels make the screen noticeably sharper. It’s not Retina quality, for sure, but it’s a definite step up from a 9.7-inch display at the same resolution.
Of course, the beauty of a 1024×768 screen is that all iPad apps work on the iPad mini right out of the box. The reduced real estate translates into slightly shrunken touch targets on the iPad mini, however. Buttons are physically smaller than on 9.7-inch iPads. Switching from a third-gen Retina iPad, I missed a few taps at first, but after even a few short minutes, my muscle-memory caught up with the new, more compact reality of the iPad mini, and things were back to normal. If you have sausage fingers, however, the reduced screen size is something you may want to consider.
On the upside, the new form-factor makes typing on the iPad mini a much better experience than on its larger brethren. I’ve never been able to faux touch-type in landscape mode on virtual keys, so I tend to use portrait mode more often. At 5.3 inches wide, the iPad mini is ideal for dual-thumb typing in portrait orientation, unlike the larger iPads, which necessitate some uncomfortable reaching. Of course, users accustomed to typing in landscape will find the keyboard necessarily shrunken, although with slightly larger keys than the portrait keyboard on the big iPad. Again, your mind and fingers will most likely adapt quickly to the new dimensions–I did.
Performance
While the screen is the most noticeable aspect of the iPad mini, the brains of the operation is Apple’s dual-core A5 chip. This is the same chip that Apple uses in the iPad 2, which hit stores in March of 2011. With the same guts, and the same screen resolution, you could consider the iPad mini an iPad 2 in skinny jeans. Not only is it slimmer and smaller, but it’s lighter too–just 0.68 pounds, compared to 1.33 pounds for the iPad 2. The cameras are also a departure from the older iPad.
The iPad 2 features a back camera at 960×720 and a front FaceTime shooter stuck at 640×480 VGA resolution. On the other hand, iPad mini packs in updated cameras on both sides. The front features a 1.2-megapixel FaceTime HD camera, while the back holds a 5-megapixel iSight camera. I tested the front camera using FaceTime (natch) and the results were good, and the mini is much easier to hold in front of you for long chat sessions than the 9.7-inch iPads.
Images with the rear camera were exactly what I expected, given that this is essentially the same camera as in the iPhone 4. Outdoor shots in even light worked best, while low-light situations proved more challenging, with a significant jump in pixel noise. Owing to the mini’s smaller size, it’s actually a lot easier to snap photos than with a large iPad. The latter is so awkward that, in all honesty, the only photos I’ve ever taken with larger iPads were shot while testing the devices. The mini on the other hand feels a lot more natural for photography, and since it’s small enough to pack just about anywhere, I can imagine the camera getting some real-world use this time around.
Since it is nearly identical to the iPad 2, app performance is pretty much the same on the iPad mini. The iOS version of GeekBench clocked the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad mini with an average score of 751, and aggregate scores of the iPad 2 hover a few points higher.
In real-world use, there are slight lags here and there, but they’re the sort of thing that tech journalists pay attention to in side-by-side tests with a third- or fourth-gen iPad. For more typical usage like web surfing, tweeting, and updating Facebook, the iPad mini performed well, and I didn’t feel hampered by the older processor. Of course, one question early adopters should ask themselves is if the older processor will become obsolete faster–and if having a mini now is worth the associated literal and figurative costs.
More graphically intensive tasks were slower than the same thing on a third-gen iPad, but we’re comparing apples to Golden Delicious apples here, not apples to Volkswagens. There is a difference, but it’s not earth-shattering. Most people, most of the time, won’t be concerned with the performance differences.
That said, if your iPad sees lots of use as a gaming machine, or for graphically intensive tasks like photo-editing, you’ll be happier with the performance of the new A6X-equipped Retina iPad. But for looking up zombie FAQs on the Internet while you’re watching The Walking Dead (or squeezing in a round of Letterpress during commercials), the iPad mini is a champ, and the smaller size is a worthy tradeoff for the slightly-slower performance.
