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iPad mini 3 review

Rating: 8/10 | Price: £319
WIRED

Amazing display, excellent battery life, fast processor, great 3D graphics, easy to use, app store still number one for quality and variety

TIRED

The addition of TouchID and gold colour option just doesn't seem to justify such a premium over the iPad mini 2; cameras and processor not improved in line with other iPads

Apple's iPad mini has always been a firm favourite tablet in the Wired.co.uk office. With the iPad mini 3 Apple has kept almost everything from the previous Retina display iPad mini 2, but added a TouchID fingerprint sensor and now offers a gold finish. The previous model remains on sale at a lower price.

The question is, can a £319 price tag be justified while last year's fantastic model can now be bought for £239?

The iPad mini 2 was thicker and heavier than the first iPad mini, and that hasn't changed in this revision. While it's barely noticeable versus the iPad Air, against the iPad Air 2 the difference is more apparent. Existing iPad mini accessories fit when we tested, including cases and Apple's own Smart Covers.

But it's the screen that's still the most remarkable aspect of Apple's tiny tablet. The new model keeps Apple's high-resolution Retina display, which packs a 2,048x1,536-pixel panel into a 7.9-inch screen. This gives the mini not only the same resolution of the 10-inch iPad Air 2, 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 6 -- 326 pixels per inch (ppi).

The mini has a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9 used on many Android systems. 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.

Inside, the iPad mini 3 has the same A7 CPU as the iPad mini 2 and the original iPad Air (the new iPad Air 2 has a tri-core 1.5GHz processor). It has the same 1GB of RAM, too. High-end racing games like Asphalt 8 and Real Racing 3 run equally well on both mini 3 and original Air, though that tighter pixel density adds an extra visual tightness to some games, masking parts of aliased (jaggy) edges around the curved lines of in-game objects.

There is a slight difference between the first iPad Air's A7 chip and the mini 3'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 3 at 2,477 on iOS 8.1. To put that in context, the original iPad mini scored just 760 (for further context, the new Air 2 scored a massive 4,484). As such, the iPad mini 3 still offers some of the best tablet performance on the market.

The major addition to the mini 3 is the inclusion of Apple's TouchID fingerprint sensor in the home button. With iOS 8, fingerprints can be used for many apps -- Evernote allows it for unlocking secure notepad databases, 1Password for permitting access to encrypted website credentials -- and as such it's time the iPad mini saw that benefit. It works as it does on the iPhone: easy to set up, very reliable recognition in use. It's not flawless (damp fingers cause recognition issues), but they are idiosyncrasies that favour 100 percent certainty the finger in use belongs to the hand of the rightful owner.

The mini 3's battery is larger than the original model but again unchanged from the mini 2: up from 16.3 watt hours for the original, the mini 3 has just under 24. This keeps power performance on par with its predecessors. 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 and iPad Air 2.

Value for money

The iPad mini 3 has strong competition: its own predecessor costs nearly £100 less and only significantly lacks the TouchID fingerprint sensor and the gold finish.

So what else does that extra money get you in an iPad mini 3?

Storage options. The iPad mini 2 now only comes in the smaller 16GB and 32GB capacities. Where value comes into play is for the higher 64GB and 128GB capacities, which are now exclusive features of the iPad mini 3.

New purchases of iPads still 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 and editing videos) and iPhoto (for photography editing and production -- it's great, by the way).

The camera remains identical to last year's lower-priced model, able to shoot Full HD 1080p video but without the image quality now available on the iPad Air 2 or the slow-mo and high-fps video recording options of the iPhone 6.

There's also no doubt that if budget is the number one factor, Apple's own rivals are putting up a strong fight. With the previous Retina display iPad mini on sale at a very competitive £239, and the non-Retina edition under the £200 mark now, the £319 price for TouchID and a gold finish is a lofty demand from Cupertino.

Conclusion

Apple originally took its landmark miniature tablet and made it significantly better. There's no doubt the iPad mini 3 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.

But with near-identical specifications to its far cheaper predecessor, we find it difficult not to conclude that despite being technically superior, the older model remains far better value. If you can afford to invest the extra bit of cash, the iPad mini 3 is our favourite of all small tablets on the market. But factor in cash and our vote goes to its more affordable brother.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK