Amazing display, excellent battery life, fast processor, great 3D graphics, easy to use, app store still number one for quality and variety
A more expensive choice in the current tablet market
Despite being scored eight-out-of-ten when it was first released in 2012, Apple's iPad mini has been a firm favourite tablet in the Wired.co.uk office. It was far from perfect thanks to its relatively low-resolution display and an older, slower processor than its bigger brother and rivals adopted.
With the iPad mini 2 (officially "iPad mini with Retina display") Apple has improved in some important areas: screen quality, performance, graphics capabilities and storage. It has had to make some clearly difficult decisions in order to do so because the price has risen, the device has become heavier and thicker and the older model has remained on sale.
So the question is, is this still the best small tablet on the market? It's on sale now for £319.
Design
The iPad mini 2 is thicker and heavier, yes. Technically. But it's barely noticeable. Its depth has increased by only 0.3mm and its weight by 29g. Holding the old model in one hand and the new one in the other, you'd be hard pressed to feel the change and it certainly doesn't make any practical difference in use. Previous accessories fit when we tested, including cases and Apple's own Smart Covers.
But it's the screen that's most remarkable. The new model features Apple's high-resolution Retina display, which packs a 2,048x1,536 panel into a 7.9-inch screen. This gives the mini not only the same resolution of the 10-inch iPad Air, but it does so in a smaller body, and that means it's technically even sharper. In fact the pixel density is identical to the iPhone 5s -- 326 pixels per inch (ppi).
This is comparable with Google's new Nexus 7, which has a near-as-dammit-identical pixel density of 323 ppi. The difference between these two models (aside from price -- the Nexus is £120 cheaper, but we'll come to that later) is that the extra diagonal inch gives the mini a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9. This is definitely preferable if word processing or regular emailing is a key use for you; longer periods of typing is definitely easier on the iPad. Colours are slightly more neutral than on the Nexus, which has a delicate warmth to it thanks to slight yellow tint.
Features and performance
The next major change Apple has made to the mini is its processing power. The first model's CPU was acceptable, but by no means competitive or impressive, and when it went on sale alongside the iPad 4 it did so with the same internal specifications as the old iPad 2. The disparity between the two models was enormous.
That is no longer the case. The iPad mini 2 has the same A7 CPU as the iPad Air. It has the same 1GB of RAM. To say the performance has increased from the first model to this iteration is the understatement of the year -- the new mini screams. High-end racing games like Asphalt 8 and Real Racing 3 run equally well on both mini 2 and Air. Plus that tighter pixel density adds an extra visual tightness to some games, masking parts of an aliased (jaggy) edges around the curved lines of in-game objects.
It really is impressive. Although there is a slight difference between the Air's A7 chip and the mini's A7: the mini's is around 100MHz slower -- 1.3GHz compared to the Air's 1.4GHz. In our testing it makes almost no perceptible difference. The only way we could spot the difference was by loading Asphalt 8 on both devices at the same moment and watching how long it took for the first level to load. The difference between the two was under one second. You could blink and miss it almost.
In raw numbers that difference is measurable. GeekBench 3, which runs a series of computational tasks to determine a processor's capabilities, scored the iPad mini 2 at 2,523. To put that in context, it scored the Air 2,694 -- a 6.8 percent difference on paper.
Apple will have made this choice no doubt to save battery life, and it will be battery life that has contributed to the increased size of the mini as well. The new battery is larger: up from 16.3 watt hours, the new model has just under 24. This keeps power performance on par with its predecessor despite the fact that the screen is double the resolution, and the processor runs about five times faster. Apple quotes 10 hours of battery life in total for constant use, though in our real-world testing we can go a couple of full days or average use before needing to fully recharge. The same is true of the iPad Air.
Value for money
The iPad mini has strong competition: Google's Nexus 7 is over £100 cheaper; the Kindle HDX only costs £209. These are two excellent rivals, although the Nexus can't offer the same performance or battery life (in our testing the quad-core Nexus scored 1,830 on GeekBench, compared to the iPad mini's 2,523).
But power and battery aside, the Nexus and Kindle are powerful, come with piles of great apps and games, and their lower cost doesn't also mean lower-quality design.
So what does that extra money get you in an iPad mini? For one, the range of apps and quality of those apps is arguably far stronger. A quick browse through either's app store reveals Apple's magnetism for high-quality software once you get past the basic essentials like Facebook, Instagram and news readers is as great as ever. The screen is also larger in one direction, and that does make it easier to use the device for productivity rather than consumption. New purchases of iPads get bundled access to Pages, Keynote and Numbers (Apple's alternative to Word, Powerpoint and Excel), as well as Garageband (for making music), iMovie (for making, er, movies) and iPhoto (for photography editing and production -- it's great, by the way).
The camera, while not noticeably any better or worse than the one that came before it, is also stronger than the Nexus's (for some reason there are no great cameras on any Android device).
Finally, compared to the Android rivals, Apple's iOS is still the most painlessly easy tablet operating system to use. It remains the one you know you can buy a technophobic parent without dreading the "my tablet thing isn't working" phone calls.
But there's also no doubt that if budget is the number one factor, the rivals are putting up a sterling fight. The Nexus 5 is still even cheaper than the non-Retina mini, which remains on sale as the entry-level iPad.
Conclusion
Apple has taken its landmark tablet and made it significantly better. There's no doubt this is the best small tablet on the market, and should budget not be a primary factor in a buying decision then it's the device to go for whether it's for screen quality, range of apps, battery life, physical design, bundled productivity software or because you've already bought into the Apple ecosystem.
The barely-noticeable increase in weight is offset largely by the phenomenal increase in screen quality and processing performance, not to mentioning graphical horsepower. It's insanely powerful for a device of its ilk, smoking the likes of the Nexus despite having half the CPU cores and less RAM.
So why, when we gave the iPad Air a perfect 10-out-of-10 score, are we awarding the new iPad mini a nine? It's largely down to price. If you already use an iPad mini and love the form factor, it's money well spent no doubt. The difference is worth it. But for newbies to the tablet world, some seriously good tablet action can be acquired for a lot less money and still be considered a very good experience.
But if you can afford to invest the extra bit of cash, this still remains our favourite of all tablets on the market. It's a corker.
- Read the WIRED Recommends guides to the best tablets, the best Android tablets and the best tablets for kids for more buying advice. When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn a small affiliate commission. This does not impact the products we recommend
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
