How much are apps worth to you? How about $120? If you want those iPad-exclusive apps and price is no object, then no other small-screen tablet will do. Beautifully made, slim, and light, the iPad mini ($329/16GB, $429/32GB, $529/64GB direct) packs precisely the power of an iPad 2 ?into a tablet you'll actually want to carry around.
Aside from the apps, though, the iPad mini isn't the best small tablet. Compared with the current $200 tablet crop that includes the Google Nexus 7 , the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, and the Barnes & Noble Nook HD, it's a little too wide, its screen isn't the best you'll find, and it's quite a bit too expensive. Nowadays, Android apps are good enough to keep the excellent Nexus 7 our Editors' Choice for small tablets.?
Design and Physical Features
At 7.87 by 5.30 by .28 inches (HWD), the mini is the slimmest tablet I've ever tested, and at 10.9 ounces, it's an ounce lighter than the Nexus 7. The front is a glass screen surrounded by a very narrow black or white bezel, with Apple's signature Home button below it. As always, Apple's Volume controls, Home button, and Mute/Screen Lock Rotation switch are perfectly placed and easy to find. The headphone jack lives in the left corner of the top panel, with Apple's new, compact Lightning port on the center of the bottom edge.
The back is wraparound black (or silver for the white model) aluminum, with the 5-megapixel camera up in the corner. The fit and finish make every other tablet look amateurish, and the body is beautifully rigid and flex-free. The metal back sure is beautiful, but it's an ergonomic mistake: It's too slippery. With a tablet you're supposed to be using with a single hand, you want a slightly grippy material on the back panel so you have something to grab. While the iPad mini is comfortable to hold because it's so light, its width puts its center of gravity further from your palm than with narrower tablets, and I kept feeling like it was almost about to slip out of my hand.
For me, the problem was made worse by the grip I had to hold it in, because the mini is just too wide for me to wrap my hand around. Everyone's hands are different, but I found the mini's 5.3-inch width is a real thumb-stretcher. It compared poorly with the Nexus 7, whose 4.7-inch width is easily grippable, especially when combined with the smaller tablet's textured back. Unlike the Nexus, I couldn't fit the mini into my back pocket, and it's a snug fit in a jacket pocket. I know others have called this a one-handed tablet, but I'm not finding it so.
Apple dodged another potential ergonomic bullet, though. The narrow bezel made me worry about accidental touches, but I didn't run into that problem; Apple has "thumb-detection" technology which, in my tests, successfully ignored my thumb on the edge of the screen.
The Screen
The iPad mini's 7.9-inch, 1,024-by-768 IPS LCD screen doesn't look low-res on its own, although you can definitely see the difference next to a 4th-generation iPad with Retina Display, a Kindle Fire HD, or a Nook HD. But the display here is sharper than the iPad 2's screen since it's smaller. Colors are richer and the screen is brighter than on the Nexus 7, although neither the color depth nor brightness measures up to the Kindle Fire HD and Nook HD displays. Another thing to consider: If you've gotten used to reading text on a Retina Display, text will look horribly low-res here.
The display is also quite reflective, and I found that very noticeable. Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies found it noticeable, too, noting in his Display Technology Shoot-Out?that the mini "reflects 53 percent more ambient light than the Nexus 7 and 41 percent more than the Kindle Fire HD."
Since the screen is larger than competing 7-inch tablets, keys on the on-screen keyboard are a little larger, too. But Apple's claim of having greater real estate than competitors is belied by the tablet's lower resolution. You see a little bit less of a Web page at a time on the mini than on the Nexus 7, and noticeably less than on the Kindle Fire. On the PCMag.com home page, for instance, the Nexus 7 displays about 75 percent of the total height, while the iPad mini's display ends about three lines of text above; the Kindle, with its even sharper screen, shows two more lines of text below the Nexus 7's range. The Nexus 7 fits more icons on a home screen: 42 versus 24 on the mini. Small type looks sharper on the other two tablets, as well.
The larger screen also doesn't confer much advantage when watching wide-screen movies; you just get huge black bars above and below them. I rented "The Hunger Games" in HD from Apple, Amazon, and Google Play. Apple's encoding was the sharpest. But the video looked about the same size on the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire; much of Apple's increased screen area was wasted by larger letterboxing bars, thanks to the boxy 4:3 screen aspect ratio. The Nexus 7's 16:10 screen displayed the movie better.
Performance and Battery Life
The iPad mini shares the iPad 2's 1GHz dual-core Apple A5 processor and screen resolution, and delivers roughly the same performance. (We test iOS devices with the Browsermark, Sunspider, Guimark, GLBenchmark, and Geekbench benchmarks.) The iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and iPad mini all offer similar performance, a little faster than the iPhone 4S ?and the new iPod touch, but noticeably slower than the new fourth-generation iPad and the iPhone 5 .
Since iOS is a hugely popular platform, though, apps are generally written to work well on the A5 and you don't see a lot of slowdowns. Need for Speed: Most Wanted, for instance, played just fine on the mini. The only hiccup I could see was in zooming the Barefoot World Atlas app, which was a bit jerky on the mini but smoother on the fourth-gen iPad. Accelerometer-based games work especially well here because the mini is such a small, light tablet. It's much easier to tilt and control the mini than with a larger iPad.
Web browsing performance beats competing seven-inch tablets. Part of that is thanks to the mini's faster 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi with channel bonding, which will probably max out your home connection. On a fast corporate link using the Ookla Speedtest.net app, I got an average of 36Mbps down, as compared with about 7Mbps on a Kindle Fire HD, and 7.6Mbps on a Nexus 7. (The low result from the KFHD really surprised me, as it's supposed to have the same faster Wi-Fi as the iPad mini.) That translates into much faster app downloads, updates, and less buffering for streaming video. The mini was also the fastest Web browser, although not by much. My basket of Web sites loaded in an average of 5 seconds each on the mini, as compared with 7.1 seconds on the Nexus 7, and 10.3 on the Kindle Fire HD.
While the model we tested was Wi-Fi-only, the mini is also available in cellular versions for AT&T's, Sprint's, and Verizon's LTE networks at a $130 premium, working on those carriers' existing iPad service plans. The LTE models integrate GPS, making the mini an excellent in-car navigation system with a third-party app like Navigon. None of the new models will run on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network.
Battery life was quite good at 7 hours, 37 minutes of video playback time with the screen at full brightness. That's better than the Kindle Fire HD's 7 hours, but doesn't measure up to the 10.5 hours we got with the Nexus 7.
(Next Page: Multimedia and Conclusions)
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