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Apple iPad Mini Review: Our New Favorite Size, But...That Price?
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1. Apple iPad Mini: You Want How Much For That Thing?

For a very long time, 10"+ tablet screens were considered the norm, wowing us with plenty of room to swipe and pinch our way around iOS and Android. But as with most things that start big (and expensive), it was only a matter of time before the tablet experience was distilled down into something less grandiose, but also more accessible and, in many ways, more practical. Call seven-inch-class tablets the Hummer H2s to the 10" H1s. Personally, when I pack for a business trip, I don't need another big piece of technology that's going to compete for space with my notebook. I either want a replacement or something small and complementary. And that's why the 7"-8" space is becoming more popular.

Tablet
Operating System (At Launch)
Screen Size
Resolution
Launch Price
iPad mini (16 GB)
iOS 6.0
7.9"
1024x768$330
iPad mini (32 GB)
iOS 6.07.9"
1024x768$430
iPad mini (64 GB)iOS 6.07.9"
1024x768$530
Kindle Fire (8 GB, Second-Gen)
Customized Android 4.0 (ICS)
7"
1024x600
$159
Kindle Fire HD (16 GB)
Customized Android 4.0 (ICS)7"
1280x800
$199
Nexus 7 (16 GB)
Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
7"
1280x800
$199
Nexus 7 (32 GB)
Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)7"1280x800$249


This time around, Apple isn't the incumbent, and that's a big deal. Its iPad mini goes up against the other smaller Android-based tablets out there, most notably Google's Nexus 7.

Deliberately ignoring the fact that the Nexus 7 sells for $199 with 16 GB of storage and Wi-Fi connectivity, Apple asks $330 for its iPad mini with similar storage and networking capabilities. As value seekers, we'd have a tough time getting over that premium, particularly since the mini is fairly accurately characterized as a scaled-down version of the iPad 2, which is almost two years old. They both employ Apple's A5 SoC and offer a similar 1024x768 resolution (which still doesn't qualify for Retina Display branding, even in a 7.9" form factor). Whether or not you consider the mini's Lightning connector an upgrade likely depends on how many accessories you own compatible with the old 30-pin interface.

We're not surprised, of course. "Apple tax" didn't become a thing because the company every made a conscious effort to compete based on pricing. But in this case, the difference is particular egregious. Most folks will probably agree that paying 65% more than a Nexus 7 is a tough sell...except for those who wear that "I overpaid" stigma as a badge of bourgeoisie ballerdom. Yes, the mini is thinner, lighter, and arguably appeals to an entirely different customer than the person shopping for a big iPad. But is that enough to justify $330?

Specifications
Length
Width
Height
Screen Size
Resolution
Aspect Ratio
Weight
Amazon Kindle Fire HD
7.6"
5.4"
0.41"
7"
1280x800
16:10
0.87 lb.
Apple iPad 3 (3G)
9.5"7.31".37"9.7"
2048x1536
4:3
1.46 lb.
Apple iPad mini (4G)
7.9"
5.3"
0.28"
7.9"
1024x768
4:3
0.69 lb.
Google Nexus 7
7.8”4.7”0.41”7”1280x80016:100.75 lb.
Motorola Xoom
9.8
6.6"
.5"
10.1"
1280x80016:10
1.5 lb.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
10.1"
6.9"
0.34"
10.1"
1280x80016:10
1.3 lb.


Naturally, we know this isn't literally a miniaturized version of the iPad 2. The iPad mini actually shares a number of design cues with newer iOS-based devices. We're living in a post-iPhone 5 world, so the mini expectedly comes equipped with Apple's Lightning connector. This is considered a necessary evolution from the company's previous interface, but we have to admit preferring mini-USB for its ubiquity across the other tablets we use.

Like the 30-pin connector that preceded it, however, Lightning allows pass-through controls for automotive stereo systems and alarm clocks. And it's for that reason Apple's fans will continue tolerating a proprietary connector.

The anodized aluminum shell may be more of a shock to those who had grown accustomed to functional design decisions. The first-, second-, and third-gen iPads utilize bare aluminum enclosures that can be scratched if you don't take care of them, but do a stellar job of hiding fingerprints. This isn't the case any more. The smudges of oily fingers are blatant, and they're much more difficult to clean thoroughly.

Initial reports indicated that the mini was delayed due to yield issues with its anodized chassis, which could have been problematic. While it's common to cover the back of a phone, Apple's polyurethane mini Smart Cover leaves the larger rear surface exposed and vulnerable. Fortunately, we haven't had any issues with unsightly scratches in the month that we've been using our mini.

Camera Comparison
Rear-Facing
Front-Facing
iPad
-
-
iPad 2
0.7 MP
0.3 MP
iPad mini
5 MP
1.2 MP
Third-Generation iPad
5 MP
0.3 MP
Fourth-Generation iPad
5 MP
1.2 MP


The 7.9" iPad also boasts upgraded cameras. Similar to the third-generation iPad, the mini employs a rear-facing 5 MP sensor. This is one feature that gives Apple's solution an advantage over the Android-based Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD, both of which lack rear-facing cameras. Is it enough to sway our initial impression? No. The folks we've seen taking pictures out in public with tablets look ridiculous. Chances are, if you're savvy and spendy enough to own a $330 iPad mini, you're probably on the iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 bandwagon as well. Pull out the smaller device and use its 8 MP camera. We have no problem with Google's decision to skip right over that feature, keeping costs down in the process. 

Apple's front-facing 1.2 MP camera is a more noticeable upgrade. Using the Skype client, a 1.2 MP sensor is a solid step up from even the third-gen iPad's .3 MP camera.

2. Apple's A5 SoC: Familiar CPU And Graphics Performance

The A5 SoC inside Apple's iPad mini isn’t new to us. We discussed it in quite a bit of depth last year in Apple's iPad 2 Review: Tom's Goes Down The Tablet Rabbit Hole. In short, though, this is still a 1 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9-based chip complemented by a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU. Memory capacity is no different; the CPU and GPU share 512 MB of LPDDR2-800.

Almost two years have passed since Apple started using the A5, though. It was originally manufactured at 45 nm, but emerged as a 32 nm SoC earlier this year. You can call it a second-generation A5, but nothing changes performance-wise. As you can see in the benchmarks below, pre-2012 iPad 2 performs comparably to the iPad mini. Even graphics performance looks the same, since both tablets employ the same 1024x768 resolution.

45 nm A5 vs 32 nm A5 (Source: Chipworks)45 nm A5 vs 32 nm A5 (Source: Chipworks)

In addition to the revised iPad 2 and iPad Mini, Apple's die-shrunk A5 is also found in the fifth-gen iPod Touch and third-gen Apple TV.

3. Web Browsing Tests

The restrictive nature of mobile operating systems like iOS and Windows RT is stunting cross-platform benchmark development. Although Google is more flexible about development on Android, quality benchmarks remain few and far between. As a result, we’re often left with Geekbench and GLBenchmark as our two performance-oriented tablet metrics. Using just two benchmarks, both of which are theoretical, makes me uncomfortable, even if the results scale as we'd expect them to. Right now, browser-based tests help fill that void, if only because they’re easy to run.

SunSpider, the V8 Benchmark Suite, and now Octane are ubiquitous in tablet and smartphone reviews. However, they are imperfect. As on the desktop, swapping from one browser to another can dramatically change the performance reflected in a browser-oriented test without necessarily reflecting the performance of your platform. In short, the browser is a variable. At least if you keep all of your hardware constant, the Web browser is the only component that changes. Here, though, we're using different browsers on different hardware, so it's difficult to draw conclusions about either.

Even though it's a more expensive machine running the full version of Windows 8, I'm including results from our upcoming Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T review for a couple of reasons. Most superficially, it's based on Intel's Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail), allowing us to compare a slightly faster version of the Medfield SoC, designed for tablets, to the ARM-based competition. Second, it’s the first truly mobile hardware platform that lets us test several browser versions (IE10, Chrome, and Safari).

When you keep your hardware platform constant, IE10 rises to the top in SunSpider (at least under Windows 8), while Chrome tops the chart in V8 and Octane. They're all JavaScript-based benchmarks, but Google publishes the latter two, so it's a little difficult for us to take them seriously.

Apple’s iPad mini performs on par with the iPad 2, as we'd expect. It trails behind the Nexus 7 in V8 and Octane, while it beats the Google tablet in SunSpider.

BrowsingBench was created by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, a non-profit organization tasked with finding ways to develop testing methodology, specifically for embedded hardware. We're been playing around with this tool in the lab, and we love it. Intended for testing "smartphones, netbooks, portable gaming devices, navigation devices, and IP set-top boxes," it's also useful for measuring browser performance in general.

Unlike SunSpider or V8, BrowsingBench evaluates the total performance of a browser: page loading, processing, rendering, compositing, and so on. This helps reflect real-world use, unlike a single JavaScript-based metric. Frankly, these results are more representative of our own subjective experience.

The second- and third-generation iPads share the same CPU hardware, and yet the iPad 2 pushes ahead. Resolution plays a big part in the rendering workload, and at 2048x1536, more is asked of the third-gen iPad than the iPad 2 at 1024x768. So even though the iPad 3 sports twice as many graphics cores and a beefier memory subsystem, it’s asked to render three times as many pixels.

And that takes us to the iPad mini. You'd think that because it shares the same SoC and native resolution as the iPad 2, both tablets would perform similarly. We connected both devices over 2.4 GHz 802.11n, and, despite repeated test iterations, the iPad mini always comes out 100 points or more ahead of the iPad 2.

BrowsingBench measures the totality of performance, and some things have changed that may impact performance. For example, we know the iPad mini employs the Murata 339S0171 Wi-Fi module based on Broadcom’s BCM4334 chipset, whereas the iPad 2 leverages Broadcom’s BCM3429.

4. LCD Performance Analyzed

Apple iPad mini: S-IPS SubpixelsApple iPad mini: S-IPS Subpixels
The iPad mini and iPad 2 both offer 1024x768 resolutions. However, the mini's screen is naturally smaller, which means its pixels are packed more tightly together. In fact, we know that the iPad Mini's LCD sports 163 pixels per inch (PPI), while the iPad 2 fits 132 PPI. As mentioned, both of those numbers are too low to qualify for Retina Display branding.

Rendering 48% of the AdobeRGB 1998 and 69% of the sRGB gamut, the iPad mini's color saturation is the same as the iPad 2.

If you map out the gamuts in 2D, the iPad mini basically overlaps the iPad 2. We're not necessarily bothered that Apple's display quality isn't any better on the mini than it was almost two years ago. The issue is that Apple's competition stepped up its game. The Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD both deliver more color saturation, the former by just 2%, but the latter by 11. 

Two percent doesn't sound like much, but don't underestimate Google's Nexus.

Color Gamut: Google Nexus 7 vs Apple iPad mini

In the video above, we've modeled the Nexus 7's (wire-frame) and iPad mini's (solid) gamuts in the Lab color space. It works like this: the top colors are highlights, or bright hues. As you go move down the vertical axis, the colors get darker. The gamut volume represents all the colors that a device can render.

We see that the iPad mini is able to render brighter reds, magentas, and a wider range of greens and cyans. The Nexus 7 sacrifices some range in green and yellow for brighter hues. The real difference is in the dark blue and magenta region. The Nexus 7 simply displays a huge range of hues that the iPad mini cannot.

Interestingly, the iPad mini reaches a somewhat higher brightness than the iPad 2, but suffers from slightly poorer contrast, since it struggles to render a true black. Yet, we can applaud Apple for getting color temperature much closer to the 6500 K standard. Gamma is still a bit high, but it's not terrible at 2.42.

Amazon's Kindle Fire HD comes across amazingly well. It scores a really high gamut volume and comes close to the professionally-calibrated 6500 K and a 2.2 gamma standards.

5. Do Your Eyes Agree With Our Benchmarks?

A couple of weeks ago, Tom's Hardware reader reprotected made a comment in Apple iPhone 5 Review: CPU, GPU, Battery, Wi-Fi, And Display Testing asking for more analysis of display quality not necessarily tied to the benchmark results, and we thought that was a good idea. Of course, we didn't want to give up those numbers altogether for subjective comparisons, so we're doing both.

There's a certain truth to the idea that numbers can only tell you so much. We've toyed with the idea of introducing color accuracy tests using our spectrophotometer, but it's largely non-intuitive, since the result is expressed in a distance metric for color space called delta E. Rather than opening that can of worms, we decided to go into a pitch-black room to capture a picture that reflects the performance of the LCD on its own. There are a few caveats to this, though.

A camera is able to capture the difference between two monitors. If you were to rank color gamut performance, it’d go camera, wide gamut monitor, high-quality printer, and then mainstream monitor and printer. So, depending on your output device, there are no guarantees that you'll see the difference in what we're about to present. So long as you're using a decent screen, though, your monitor should render a similar image. Further, these pictures haven't been optimized in any way. We're simply publishing them after converting RAW files to PNG, which means all six comparisons are made under the same conditions.

We want to avoid any preconception, so these pictures are unlabeled. Which tablet looks the best to you? Take a look at the pictures and form your own opinion. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the answer to which tablet is which.

In each set, the Nexus 7 is up top, rendering deeper red, blue, yellow, and magenta. You may disagree, but just look at the shot above; the blue flowers less brilliant in the second set of pictures, from the iPad mini. This supports our analysis on the previous page, particularly the 3D gamut video.

6. Battery Life

Despite its third-place finish in our Web browsing battery life test (at maximum brightness), we're a little underwhelmed. Yes, the iPad mini edges out larger tablets with bigger batteries and more power-hungry displays, but just barely. It only gives you nine more minutes of run time than the iPad 2, well within a margin of error. More important is that Apple's 7.9" tablet trails the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD by more than an hour.

In absolute terms, the iPad mini performs better in our movie playback test, delivering close to eight hours of battery life. That's almost two hours more than the Kindle Fire HD. Google's Nexus 7 still reigns supreme in this test, though, delivering nearly ten hours of run time. It's a little counter-intuitive that the iPad 2 offers better battery life than the mini, but the delta between them is significant.

Normalized Brightness Benchmarks (Background Info)

With all of our tablets calibrated to 200 nits, the iPad mini doesn't do as poorly compared to Google's Nexus 7 in the Web browsing test, though it suddenly finds itself behind the iPad 2 and third-gen iPad, neither of which are losing battery life as quickly to a display operating at maximum brightness. Amazon's Kindle Fire HD takes first place in this one, though.

Google's Nexus 7 remains very close to the iPad mini, just as it was in the previous chart. But the Kindle Fire HD gets bested by more than an hour in our video playback metric. It was blown out at maximum brightness, too.

Epic's Citadel is one of the more popular titles for iOS because it's based on the same code used in Infinity Blade. Much like 3DMark, Citadel loops a sequence through the app's landscape. But even as it serves up a modest graphics workload, Citadel is a tech demo, so we have to take its outcome in context.

Riptide is perhaps more appropriate for benchmarking battery life in a 3D environment because it's a real-world game. The title enters into demo mode whenever it sits idle on the home screen. According to Vector, Riptide's developer, textures are dynamically rendered during the demo, resulting in a continuous workload.

It's a little surprising to see the iPad mini match the iPad 2's battery life since the latter enjoys a larger power source. More impressively, the iPad mini trounces its competition in this test; the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD show up at the opposite end of the chart.

7. Recharge Time

Due to space constraints, Apple is able to fit a 16.3 Wh battery into the iPad mini, whereas the iPad 2 enjoys a 25 Wh power source. You'd think the tablet with the smaller battery would charge faster, but that's not the case. It takes almost 45 minutes longer to charge an iPad mini to 90% than an iPad 2. The mini takes 30 minutes longer than the iPad 2 to get to 100%, too. Why? Charging is a careful balancing act between convenience and the battery's health.

This leaves the iPad mini at a severe disadvantage though, because the Nexus 7 reaches its full charge significantly faster. Even Amazon beats Apple this time around.

The inability to charge while plugged into your PC or Mac via USB is an annoying omission shared by most Android-based tablets. The Nexus 7 and Kindles are exceptions. Fortunately, all iOS-based devices can charge as they sync. 

Apple's iPad mini again takes longer to charge than the iPad 2, though. The mini's only redemption is that the Nexus 7 and Kindles both take significantly longer to hit 90%, and then 100% charge this way.

8. Apple's iPad Mini Is Nice, But We Like Our Alternatives

In a world peppered with Ultrabooks, convertibles, and tablets, it's more difficult to pick a favorite form factor than it is to find a favorite device. We have notebooks laying around that date back several generations. And while some of us appreciate the potency of a mobile workstation, most would rather go thin and light, and then get back to home base as soon as possible for any gaming we might be missing out on.

If a tablet makes it into our bags, that's because, much of the time, we don't want to wait for a laptop to boot up, we don't want it resting on our legs, and we have no desire to do battle with a touchpad. Historically, based on what was available, we usually ended up toting a ~10" tablet.

Now, I know it's not selling particularly well, but Microsoft's Surface is the first device we've had in the lab encouraging multiple people to drop the whole laptop/tablet tag team and use one device that can live between both worlds. Suddenly, the allure of a big, dumb $500 consumption-oriented device is a lot less pronounced.

At $600 with a Touch Cover, the Surface isn't for everyone either, though. And that's where the 7-8" tablets come into play. Form factor-wise, you have a smaller, lighter, easier to carry device with just as much functionality as the larger models. Only, in the case of Google's Nexus 7, you can get it for as little as $199. Pshya. That makes sense. No wonder we gave it an award.

Then there's Apple's iPad mini. It's thin. It's light. It's all of the things we like about smaller tablets. We're not big fans of buying new Lightning connector-compatible accessories, and the mini could certainly benefit from a higher-resolution, higher-quality LCD. But it feels good in our hands. We get why folks would spend as much (or even a little more) on this thing as they would a Nexus 7.

But Apple doesn't ask you to pay a little more. The iPad mini starts at $329 and can quickly shoot up as high as $659 for the 64 GB cellular-equipped version. That's insane. As we transition into 2013, we'll be heading out to Las Vegas for CES with Microsoft's Surface. If a tablet makes it into our bags as well, it'll be the Nexus 7. There are just so many other things to do with $130 out there that we simply couldn't recommend spending the difference on an iPad mini.