First Look: iPad Mini

Jim Dalrymple:

Clearly I wasn’t able to really put the device through its paces, but I was wondering if the mini would be too small. Many of the people I’ve talked to leading up to this introduction that wanted a mini commute to work or school and found the original iPad a bit too big.

After listening to those concerns and seeing the iPad mini, I can certainly see how this would alleviate those problems. The iPad mini can easily be held with one hand for reading.

My five-minute take: It runs iPad apps, but feels like a a “big iPhone” in use. It feels smaller than I expected it to. Having held it, “Mini” now makes sense as the name for it. I can definitely hold it in one hand, and I wonder if that’s exactly the reason for the new scrolling (as opposed to page-turning) theme in iBooks. (Should make iBooks better on the iPhone, too.)

Screen resolution-wise, it’s exactly what I expected for a 163 PPI display in 2012: noticeably nicer than the 133 PPI iPad 1/2, noticeably worse than the 266 PPI iPad 3/4. The iPad Mini display seems brighter and to have better contrast than the iPhone 3GS display, but unsurprisingly, rendered text looks exactly like it does on the 3GS.

★ Tuesday, 23 October 2012