Apple iPad mini review

Apple iPad mini
From £269 (WiFi-only); From £369 (4G)
Released November 2 (WiFi-only); Mid-November (4G)

Apple has been dismissive of 7-inch tablet computers and has therefore been keen to emphasise that the iPad mini isn't one. The extra 0.9-inches of screen on the iPad mini are the crucial difference, Apple says, and having tried it for a week and compared it to some rivals, I'd have to agree.

The screen is the most important thing in an iPad, obviously, but before we get to that, a little about the device itself. The iPad mini is yet another wonderful piece of Apple design. Google's Nexus 7 tablet is a perfectly fine piece of hardware - there is one sitting on the desk in front of me as I type - but it's plastic. And, somehow, it's still heavier than the aluminium iPad mini.

There are plenty of people who care nothing for how a gadget looks. The specificationists are more interested in processor cores, USB ports and whether they can root their operating system. That's fine. They'll be unmoved by the sleek metal back and the chamfored edges of the iPad mini. Nevertheless, this is a device that looks and feels great. It's unexpectedly thin and light and in my view it's the best looking tablet computer anyone has designed, beating even its older brother, the 10-inch iPad.

Though the iPad mini features Apple's new Lightning connector instead of the old 30-pin dock connector, other controls will be familiar from previous iPad models. The headphone socket is on the top left, with the sleep/wake button on the opposite corner. On the top edge of the right-hand side are the volume buttons and the mute switch.

The sacrifice in screen size from a 10-inch tablet is balanced out by the more convenient size. You can hold it in one hand, slip it into a jacket pocket or a handbag and still have all the power of an iPad at your fingertips. In practice the smaller screen size is not much of a problem and it is because of that 0.9-inches, which gives 35 per cent more screen area than the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HD.

All three devices are fine as ereaders - better suited to the task than 10-inch tablets, really, so it's no surprise that Apple emphasised iBooks when the iPad mini was unveiled. This is Apple's best ereading device.

But it's with tasks such as web browsing where the extra screen real estate counts. Viewing a full-width web page on the Nexus 7 means the text is uncomfortably small, for my taste, making it essential to zoom in and scroll to read everything. The iPad mini is just about as small as a screen can get without necessitating zooming and scrolling.

Of course, this depends to a large extent on your eyesight and the size of text that you're comfortable reading. For me, the 7.9 screen beats the 7-inch screen. Though, overall, I still prefer a 10-inch tablet for web browsing. Whether that changes after a few more weeks with the iPad mini, time will tell.

Where rival tablets have an advantage is in pixels-per-inch. The iPad mini screen has 162 pixels-per-inch, fewer than the 216ppi Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. The extra 54 pixels provide a slight increase in sharpness on the rivals but even then, not as much as I'd like. Having used a retina display iPad and iPhone for so long, the iPad mini screen just looks a little blurry.

^{Apple's iPad mini has a 7.9-inch display (Photo: Bloomberg)}

Another area where the rivals have the upper hand is in HD video: the iPad mini doesn't have a high definition display. I'm not convinced that this is the tablet size you would choose if you planned to regularly watch films on it but plenty of people seem happy to watch films on even smaller screens.

This puts the iPad mini in the position of being able to shoot higher quality video than it can play back. Obviously, you can share these clips at their full resolution online or stream them to a television using AirPlay, should you be the sort of person who likes to use a tablet to take photos and shoot video.

With a retina display this would be a knock-out device but its unlikely that Apple could put one in a tablet this size at this point. The third-generation iPad has a retina display and it is thicker and heavier than the iPad 2. The battery needed to power such a display to the 10-hour battery life Apple insists on for its iPads would probably have compromised the mini's size too much.

Apple could probably have matched the pixel density of the 7-inch tablets if it had wished to but that would have changed the screen resolution, meaning that existing iPad apps would have run with black bands of unused pixels alongside them. As it is, the 1024x768 display means the existing library of 275,000 tablet specific apps are all available.

I tested a few more recent - and demanding - apps to see how the iPad mini coped and found no problems at all. The mini is powered by the same Apple A5 chip found inside the iPad 2 and apps didn't seem to run slowly, nor did the device get particularly warm.

When it comes to tablet-specific apps, the iPad is still some way ahead. You won't find the amazing Touch Press apps, such as Shakespeare's Sonnets or The Waste Land, on anything other than an iPad, for example. Android will catch up, just as it has with smartphone apps, but for now the gap is significant enough that it should make you think twice about buying a rival.

On the other hand, what will make some think twice about buying an iPad mini is the price. Starting at £269 for a WiFi only model, this is £100 dearer than the Kindle Fire HD or the Nexus 7, which is now available in a 16GB version for £159.

Whether it's worth it depends on how much of a premium you put on great design and a vast ecosystem of apps. Apple will sell a lot of these little beauties, that's for sure.