Great size, reasonably powerful, great for gaming and reading, long battery life, great selection of apps, lightweight and suitable for reading one-handed
Not as good value as competing tablets, lower screen resolution and CPU horsepower than we would expect
To me, the full-size iPad is the best tablet computer on the market for the vast majority of people; it's in every regard the tablet that has consistently drawn me back after testing the competition. Except that for the last few weeks it has stayed at home, out of charge, gathering dust like a relic of a bygone technological era.
It's a redundancy that caught me by surprise. It's also a result of cannibalisation, because the culprit for this redundancy is the iPad Mini, which I have been using daily for the last few weeks.
It's on sale now for £269, and has -- in all seriousness -- made me question the future of the ten-inch tablet form factor entirely; it's perhaps the most enticing tablet on the market and the future of the iPad.
I'm going to explain why.
Design and display
In a nutshell, the iPad Mini a walking contradiction: it's well-priced but not cheap; it feels fresh but it's playing catch-up to Android and at first glance appears to bring nothing new to the market; it's beautiful and, well, actually it has no real competition there. Its design is wonderful.
When you first pick up the iPad Mini, which you can do comfortably with fingertips, it feels like a tablet computer should feel. Its eight-inch screen size seems to contribute little extra to its 308g weight and 7mm depth. It's no less comfortable in one hand than a lengthy novel and I can attest to comfortably using it for two or three hours in one stretch without my second hand feeling an urge to intervene for comfort's sake.
Its screen is, by Apple's Retina standards, nothing to shout about, but is still superior to many devices for most uses, and its non-Retina pixel count of 1,024x768 is suited well to this screen size. But it's clearly a consciously reserved choice of resolution, given Apple's prowess in the arena of high-resolution displays.
It's deliberately leaving room for an upgrade, which is slightly vexing. You can picture Tim Cook on stage in a year's time: "People love iPad Mini but all we heard was 'We want Retina!' Well, we heard you. Here's the iPad Mini with Retina Display." It's almost sickeningly predictable. But it makes this introductory model no less a pleasure to use, as long as you can discount a Retina model's eventual release.
Text is sharp, but competing seven-inch tablets such as Google's Nexus 7 do appear sharper. The same goes for photographs. But the iPad Mini still provides excellent detail, clarity and colour depth. Viewing angles, too, are extremely impressive. View the screen from any angle and you'll still get to appreciate whatever image you're looking at.
As a keyboard, the smaller screen has obvious physical limitations. One of the main questions that arose when the original iPad came on the market was, "How is the touchscreen to type on?"
That's an even more important question now a couple of inches have been shaved off to make the iPad Mini pocketable. The answer is, "Fine, but it takes some adapting to."
I'm typing this paragraph on the iPad Mini to remind myself how well I've got used to this form factor. I'm mostly just using my index finger, middle finger and very occasionally my fourth fingers. It doesn't feel like typing on the iPad 2 as the keyboard is physically smaller. But a little bit of adjustment is all that's required to type at a decent speed here. In fact, in the course of writing this paragraph I have only made two mistaken keystrokes. I could not do so well on the Nexus 7, nor the Kindle Fire HD.
Performance
Internally the specifications deliver good results. The processor is Apple's own dual-core 1GHz A5 CPU, as used in the iPad 2, the iPhone 4S and others. Additionally it features the same RAM as the iPad 2 (503MB, precisely) and the same screen resolution (albeit it at a higher pixel density, so text and images are slightly sharper). It's essentially a small iPad 2 and delivers near-identical performance results in real-world usage: big photos and web pages load fast, the OS is snappy to flick through, 3D gaming is absolutely no problem. Anything you've been running on an iPad 2 will perform just as well here. Most things designed for the iPad 3 will likely run without real issues.
Put in numbers, we're met with similar results. Using the tool GeekBench to determine precise performance capabilities, the iPad 2 (running iOS 6) scored 763. That means nothing to most people, but becomes a useful number when you consider the iPad Mini scored 760 -- a difference of just three points. We're looking at two devices that differ on performance so little its negligible.
What is different between the iPad 2 and the iPad Mini, however, is the camera. Or cameras, specifically. On the front, image quality is significantly better on the iPad Mini than the iPad 2.
The front-facing 1.2-megapixel lens (up from 0.3 megapixels) can be used for HD FaceTime video calls, in addition to capturing video at 720p HD, and the quality is a real step up; around the back the five-megapixel lens (versus the iPad 2's 0.7-megapixel lens) captures video in 1080p.
It's no more convenient to use as a camera than any other device of this size, but in terms of picture quality it's decent. For Facebook photos, holiday video clips and -- curse us to say it, but let's be realists -- Instagram, the lenses here are excellent and give acceptable results in low light conditions in our experience.
Eight-inch versus seven-inch
The late Steve Jobs once said seven-inch tablets were "dead on arrival". The iPad Mini -- an eight-inch tablet -- is made a very different beast by that bonus inch. Its strongest competition is the Kindle Fire HD and Google's Nexus 7 -- both ultra low-cost devices with seven-inch screens -- and while both are superb pieces of technology, they are very different to the iPad Mini when you hold them side-by-side. Much of this is down to that additional -- and, crucially, diagonal -- inch. On one hand (literally), the Nexus 7 feels like a very, very large Android phone, in part due to some of the apps originally being designed for phones. It's powerful, slick and affordable, but it did not compel me to use it much differently to how I use a smartphone. The Kindle Fire HD, similarly, made me use it like a media consumption device, but not a device I could use to "produce" anything, just consume. I wasn't gaming, wasn't replying to email, wasn't using it with Evernote for note-taking in meetings.
The Mini, with its expansive catalogue of apps, games and utilities, takes the best of these devices and wraps them in a familiar package, iOS, which is still the most intuitive mobile operating system around. The extra inch the iPad Mini affords its user in addition to this is really taken advantage of, and it makes a big difference.
Battery life is rated at 10 hours by Apple, and with average daily usage you can expect to go several days between charges with wireless functionality disabled.
Conclusion
Everything about the iPad Mini makes me believe this is the design that an iPad wants to be; in comparison, the "iPad maxi" feels oversized for many tasks it is commonly used for. In fact, looking at the iPad Mini, you're almost certainly looking at the future of the iPad line. I believe the full-size iPad will ultimately reside as a "pro" version, much how the MacBook Air sits alongside the MacBook Pro.
But, as satisfying as the iPad Mini is to use, it's not without its drawbacks. Compared to its competition it's not as affordable, and Apple has clearly released the device with last-gen specifications (A5 vs A6, standard screen vs Retina Display) in order to wow us in a year's time with the revamped version with a higher resolution screen and improved performance.
That notwithstanding, the iPad Mini is a superb product and the most attractive way for a new user to enter the world of tablets, and indeed the world of Apple. It's priced higher than the competition to maintain its premium aesthetic and desirability, and it's hard not to wish it was priced below £230. But despite this, it's still a compelling purchase that users are rightly going to love using, and hate leaving at home.
- 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
