Gadgetory

the iPad Mini may not be as affordable as some of the ultra cheap tablets out there and it may not be as full-fledged and powerful as the fourth-generation iPad but if you want the most portable iPad that's compatible with a full gamut of apps well this one's pretty hard to resist and it's got a form that's pretty easy to take with you I'm Scott Stein and this is the very cute and pretty addictive iPad Mini when the iPad Mini was announced the whole idea was to take the iPad experience and make it smaller making a selling more like a Kindle make it something that competes with the 7-inch tablet market and lo and behold this is a really small device and it kind of takes holding one to know how small it is and how light it is 0.68 pounds and it's about over half the weight of the third-generation fourth-generation iPad and it feels in the hand a lot like a book or a Kindle even more so than other 7-inch tablets out there they notice the design is different and it's really taking a page more from the iPod Touch it's a curved anodized aluminum shell that goes all the way around the sides and it's flat on the back and it curved on the edges and the taper over here is sort of an aluminum bezel is a lot like the iPhone 5s the iPad Mini comes like the larger iPad in white or black although in the black model this is all slate-colored aluminum and there are a bunch of smart covers now they're different than the others these are all fabric material there's no aluminum connector whatsoever and they're a little more discreet in the sense that you can fold them over with one fewer panels tuck them in but they work just as well for putting them up as a stand or folding it down into virtual keyboard mode in fact this thing in the stand mode is actually a fantastic little picture frame it's a lot cuter than the larger iPad there's a five megapixel iSight camera on the back there's an HD FaceTime camera on the front that's similar to the fifth-generation iPod Touch and similar to what's on the new fourth gen iPad there's no flash on the back but you can shoot 1080p video and you can take FaceTime calls in HD and you can run all the features in iOS 6 that you'd expect including Siri and the new apps whether you like it or not is built-in and all the other features in iOS 6 that we know about are built-in now Apple has internals in this that are very similar to other products that are out there this is an a5 processor which puts it relatively in the same territory as the iPad 2 and the fifth-generation iPod Touch so what makes this different it's kind of a tweener device with a 7.9 inch screen and who would be interested in this well I'd say anyone who's doing a lot of reading and like say do you have a super portable iPad now with the fourth-generation iPad that came out the same time all of a sudden this is the next generation of iPads much faster than anyone had been expecting myself included you have a much faster processor at that top-end level and an a6 X and this is an a5 so you have a performance gap and you also have a Retina display on that end you also a price difference the fourth-generation iPad starts at $4.99 for 16 gigabytes this is 330 for starting with 16 gigabytes and the first thing that comes to mind when I look at this is probably kids because of the fact that you can take this around with you sort of like the iPod Touch for a lot of people but it's something that's much more total much more easily holdable of small hands and can go on trips even easier and there's also LTE that's available you can pay $130 more for that configuration and LTE in the new iPad Mini and the fortune iPad has been improved because now it works internationally much better that might be very peeling the people who want to use this as their all-in-one device now apples making claims that you know anything that you'd use an iPad for you can use this for the first thing that will come to many people's minds is how are you gonna type on a screen that small and I found that it actually works pretty well it's not going to be like a laptop or even like an iPad with that virtual screen but the difference with this is not only can you type on it in landscape mode but you can really hold it in your hands and type on it in portrait mode and really not feel much of a problem there and games and apps that I've downloaded ranging from GarageBand iMovie to virtual board game apps like ticket to ride or Carcassonne many of them having little icons all seem really usable on this screen so that's a big win and the other big factor in this magazines digital publications a lot of times on 7-inch tab get shrunken down and here in a four by three aspect ratio you look at issues of magazines out there like maybe the New York or wired or New York Times and they feel readable in that format now if you used Retina display and you're an iOS user you probably are living in retinol and all the time there is a difference here this is a thousand 24 by 768 and even though it looks better and crisper than on the iPad 2 which had the same pixel resolution it is not retinal and and you can notice that it may seem a little fuzzier if you've used anything like in any of the current iPhones the fifth-generation iPod Touch or the 3rd gen iPad or even the 4th gen iPad you'll notice the difference in crispness but if you haven't used those devices if you're coming to an iPad for the first time text is readable you can read everything even down to small emails perfectly well and that's not a surprise because you could read emails on an iPad to perfectly well and really you're dealing with that in a slightly shrunken form here now which iPad do you pick that's really up to you I think it's really hard to turn away a form that is this small but on the other hand the Fortune iPad is really an improvement on what already been there in the third generation and really takes the speed up to a different level and I think fixes some of that element in terms of compatibility with graphics that have been there before although it may be very frustrating for people that the fourth trend iPad is out there this might be a great second iPad for people this may be an iPad for people looking couldn't afford the other one and for people who do really pick it for reading and pick it for media consumption but you're there are a lot of other devices like this out there certainly you know we've got the Amazon Kindle Fire you get the Kindle Fire HD we've got the Nook plus you've got the Google Nexus 7 and a lot of these have prices that are really low as low as $1.99 and this at $330 is a premium but on the other hand the screen on this is a lot wider and the compatibility with the existing number of apps on the App Store which is really sizable is a difference maker when will you see a Retina Display on this who knows but right now it's a fantastic form factor and an interesting addition to the library maybe not essential to a lot of people but when you pick it up it's gonna be hard to put back I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the new iPad Mini available in November 2nd