Apple iPad mini Wi-Fi

APPLE IPAD MINI WI-FI REVIEW

In the summer and fall of 2012, the rumor vortex spinning around the launch of Apple's compact iPad was so charged that it seemed to give birth to the device itself. (Rumorville nailed the tablet's ultimate name iPad Mini well in advance.) All the conjecture, so much of it correct, stole much of the Mini's thunder at Apple's announcement of the device in October 2012. Indeed, the fact of its release wasn't nearly as surprising as two of the key details about it: the screen specs, and the price. Like a middle child, though, the Mini has to work out its role in the family. Light and portable like the Touch, but larger-faced like the iPad, the Mini delivers some of the best of both worlds. But its resolution—a critical spec for any tablet—of 1,024x768 is far below those of the 2012 iPads’ Retina displays, at 2,048x1,536. (Even the latest iPod Touch packs in 1,136x640 resolution at 326ppi.) As we mentioned earlier, the best of the iPad Mini’s direct 7-inch Android competitors have higher resolutions, too. The late Steve Jobs famously dismissed a 7-inch display as too small for a tablet, and perhaps the mini’s 7.9-inch display was inspired by Apple’s late leader. At nearly 8 inches diagonally, the display is a bit more than a third-again larger than the screens in its 7-inch competitors. And considering the overall size of the iPad Mini, the front is almost all screen. Plus, for those who find Apple's full-size iPads too big to carry or hold for long periods, the Mini is a welcome relief. You can easily hold it in one hand at 5.3 inches by 7.9 inches (wide by high). And at just 0.28 inch thick, it feels like you're holding a small pane of glass, rather than a full-fledged tablet. We’ve already discussed the iPad Mini’s display at length, but a few more details are worth mentioning. (It is, after all, the Mini’s primary feature.) The bezel is quite narrow on the left and right, and your thumb will no doubt rest on the display. Apple accounted for this by enabling the display to distinguish between a thumb tap and a thumb resting along the screen edge. We found this worked rather well, although tapping to close browser windows and other actions near the bezel occasionally required some persistence. This isn’t a deal-breaker, though—just a new nuance in adapting to touch technology. The display is very sharp and vivid, even in side-by-side comparisons of HD video playback on the iPad Mini against an iPad with the Retina display. But we did note, while comparing some search results from Google Images, that the iPad Mini’s hue balance was skewed a little toward magenta (red), while the display of the third-gen iPad was a bit cooler, toward cyan (blue). Neither iPad has controls for color balance, and both images looked true-to-life, but the difference suggests room for improvement. Apple claims a fingerprint-resistant “oleophobic coating” covers the display, but our impression from our testing was that the iPad Mini was ever-so-slightly more smudge-prone than the iPad 2 or 3. (The narrower bezels may mean there's less non-screen area on which to plant your grubby thumbs.) Also, we sensed that the iPad Mini’s display cast a bit more glare than the full-size iPads in our anecdotal side-by-side testing, but the difference was very difficult to pin down. The iPad Mini has a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera, which can record video in 1080p high definition. This is in addition to the standard front-facing, 1.2-megapixel camera, which can record video in 720p. Given the highly portable size of the iPad Mini, the rear-facing camera is a logical and valuable feature. It’s surprising that the Mini’s main competitors lack one, particularly the Nexus 7. Most folks would feel much less silly using a Mini to shoot video versus holding up a full-size iPad. When it comes to apps, the iPad Mini gives you a relatively inexpensive way to access the 275,000 iOS apps designed for the full-size iPads. The screen resolution may be lower than the latest iPads', but it was selected to accommodate apps in the same way the original iPad and the iPad 2 still work with the massive library of iOS apps. Also worth noting: The iPad Mini can run Apple's Siri voice-command assistant, something the iPad 2 can’t. Across the two years of its life, the iPad family has been criticized for not running Flash videos, but it should be noted that Android has followed that trend in its newest version, 4.1 (nicknamed “Jelly Bean”). While the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and B&N Nook HD can run Flash (since they have the older Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” version of the OS), the Nexus 7 runs Jelly Bean sans Flash. So this is no longer the big demerit it once was for iPads as a whole. Matching the iPad 2, the iPad Mini is powered by Apple’s 1GHz dual-core A5 processor and features a 1,024x768 display. As you might guess, our SunSpider, GUImark, GLBenchmark, and Geekbench benchmark tests showed the iPad Mini’s performance generally mirrored the iPad 2's. Both were a notch below the current (fourth-gen) iPad, which runs on a dual-core A6X processor and quad-core graphics. That said, we noticed no significant difference between the iPad Mini and the third-generation iPad 3 in side-by-side Web-surfing tests, playing HD videos, and general Googling around. You won’t have time to go get a sandwich during downloads or browser bashing, either—there’s plenty of power packed into the iPad Mini for general Web tasks, and the 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity was indeed notably robust. Our sister site, PCMag.com, ran a panoply of Wi-Fi-throughput and app-load tests on the iPad Mini, as well as on two of its closest 7-inch competitors (the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Google Nexus 7). They saw the iPad Mini come out on top in all cases, recording especially fast downrange speeds (as measured by SpeedTest.net), and mildly faster Web-site load times (with a custom selection of sites). Apple estimates up to 10 hours of battery life performing a mix of Web surfing via Wi-Fi, video playback, and listening to music, or up to 9 hours using a cellular connection. (Our test-model iPad Mini did not have cellular capability, only Wi-Fi.) Our tests generally confirmed these numbers. We saw just shy of 8 hours with video playback at full screen brightness; at half brightness, we achieved almost 13 hours, which shows what a difference your brightness settings make! This also competes well with the 7-inch-slate competition, though the Nexus 7 outlasted the iPad Mini by about 2.5 hours at full brightness. If you’re just looking for a 7in tablet, with no preference to OS or ecosystem, it will be hard to ignore the value proposition of the Nexus 7. But if you’ve already bought into the Apple ecosystem and want a light and slim tablet to extend that ecosystem, the iPad mini is exactly what you need.

SPECIFICATION & FEATURES