Enlarge / The Retina iPad mini snuffs out last year's compromises.
Andrew Cunningham
You needed to know two things about the first iPad mini. The first thing is that it was, well, mini—it was a 7.9-inch tablet from a company whose CEO once said that users would have to sandpaper their fingers down to comfortably use anything smaller than a full-size iPad. The second was that it didn't include Apple's so-called Retina display, the high-density screen that by then had become standard-issue in iPhones and iPads.
How quickly we got used to those high-resolution screens! The first Retina iPad came out in March of 2012, and in our review of the first mini, we already had trouble going back to a non-Retina display. With this year's iPad mini, Apple addressed our complaints, bestowing upon the tablet a Retina display and removing the single largest roadblock to iPad mini ownership.
How does the new Retina iPad mini stack up compared to excellent, cheap Android tablets like the2013 Nexus 7? And where does it stand next to Apple's other thin-and-light tablet, the newly svelteiPad Air?
Body, build quality, and other hardware
Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson unpacks and spends some quality time with the Retina iPad mini and its display.
SPECS AT A GLANCE: APPLE RETINA IPAD MINI
SCREEN
2048×1536 7.9-inch (324 PPI) touchscreen
OS
iOS 7.0.4
CPU
1.3GHz Apple A7
RAM
1GB DDR3
GPU
"Apple A7 GPU" (likely an Imagination Technologies 6-series variant)
STORAGE
16, 32, 64, or 128GB NAND flash
NETWORKING
802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0
CAMERA
5MP rear camera, 1.2MP front camera
PORTS
Lightning connector, headphone jack
SIZE
7.87" × 5.3" × 0.29" (200 × 134.7 × 7.5 mm)
WEIGHT
0.73 pound (331 g) Wi-Fi, 0.75 pounds (341 g) with cellular
BATTERY
6471 mAh
STARTING PRICE
$399
OTHER PERKS
Charger, Lightning cable
The Retina iPad mini is one of those Apple hardware updates that doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to its physical design. It's difficult to tell the difference between the new mini and the old one by looking at the two, unless your non-Retina mini happens to be one of the now-retired black models. Even though the old mini continues on at a new $299 price point, it's now offered in white/silver and black/"space gray" just like the Retina mini, iPad Air, and iPhone 5S.
The new tablet is actually a little heavier and infinitesimally thicker than its predecessor—it doesn't gain as much weight as the full-size iPad did when it first got its Retina display, but it does go against Apple's ever-thinner-ever-lighter design trend. The new tablet is 0.29 inches thick (up from 0.28) and weighs 0.73 pounds (up from 0.68; the LTE model weighs 0.75 pounds, up from 0.69). The increase in thickness is barely noticeable and is so slight that the two can share Smart Covers and Smart Cases. The increase in weight is noticeable if you've got both tablets to hold in your hands simultaneously to compare, but it is mostly negligible if you're just using the Retina iPad mini by itself.
Both of its nearest competitors are a little thicker but a little lighter (0.34 inches and 0.64 pounds for the 2013 Nexus 7, 0.35 inches and 0.67 pounds for the Kindle Fire HDX). The size and aspect ratio of the mini's display makes a difference, though. On the one hand, a 4:3 screen is better suited to use in landscape mode for many use cases. It's surprising just how much more of the Ars homepage the iPad can show off at once relative to the Nexus 7's 16:10 screen.
Enlarge / The Retina iPad mini in landscape mode.
Andrew Cunningham
Enlarge / The Nexus 7 in landscape mode. Bring up the onscreen keyboard and your page will get even smaller.
Andrew Cunningham
On the other hand, the wider screen makes the tablet more difficult to palm or to fit in a pocket (if pocketing tablets is your thing). I have reasonably large hands, but they strain to palm the iPad mini where they can easily wrap around the Nexus 7. The more natural way to hold the iPad is by its edge, where you rely heavily on iOS' thumb rejection to ignore the parts of your hands that rest on or near the touchscreen as you use it. iOS is pretty adept at thumb rejection—even if I intentionally pressed around half my thumb down on the right edge of the screen, it in no way altered the touchscreen's accuracy or responsiveness.
Despite the minor differences (and the high-resolution screen, which we'll get to in a moment) most of the observations we made last year about actually holding and using the tablet are exactly the same. The physical size of the tablet and of its onscreen elements are substantially identical to last year's mini. It offers a smaller but still usable version of the full-size iPad experience. Where Android makes a distinction in software between 7-inch and 10-inch tablet interfaces, the iPad doesn't. Anything that runs on a full-size iPad will look and act the same way on an iPad mini, and you won't run into anything one can do that the other won't also do.
Enlarge / From bottom to top: the iPad Air, the Retina iPad mini, the standard iPad mini, and the 2013 Nexus 7. All very thin tablets.
Andrew Cunningham
Enlarge / The iPad mini (right) looks like a smaller version of the iPad Air (left). Or does the Air look like a bigger version of the mini?
Andrew Cunningham
Enlarge / Both tablets come in "space gray" (left) and silver (right).
Andrew Cunningham
Enlarge / The cutout at the top of the tablet is only present on LTE models to let signal through.
Andrew Cunningham
Before we get to the best part of the tablet, there's a small grab bag of minor features that all bear mentioning even though they're not worth spending a ton of time on. First, the device's stereo speakers in our review unit were a fair bit quieter than those in the iPad Air or last year's iPad mini, but in terms of sound quality and clarity, they're more or less a match for those in the iPad Air. They're noticeably less muffled-sounding than the old mini's speakers (they'll also still get loud enough to fill a room with OK-sounding music if you'd like).
Next up, you've got the cameras, which are identical to those used in the iPad Air (we'll point you to that review for a few comparison shots). The short version is that the upgraded 1.2MP FaceTime camera is a little better in low-light situations than it was before, and the 5MP rear camera takes pictures that rest somewhere between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S in quality. They're good enough for Facebook, which is about as good as they have to be.
The Retina iPad mini also picks up dual microphone pinholes, one of which is situated on the top edge of the tablet and the other of which is on the back of the tablet toward the top. As we found in our iPad Air review, these don't really help much with Siri or any dictation software, but they do help to reduce noise when video chatting.
And finally, there's the short list of features that aren't here, namely the fingerprint-reading Touch ID sensor and the iPhone 5S' gold color option. We're calling it now: gold will be the killer feature of the Retina iPad mini 2.
The screen you’ve all been waiting for
Enlarge / The Retina mini (left) and the 2013 Nexus 7 (right) have near-identical pixel densities and great screens. Because its LCD and glass layers are fused, color and contrast "pop" just a bit more on the Nexus, but the mini has more screen real estate to offer.
Andrew Cunningham
Longtime Apple followers have been through this non-Retina-to-Retina transition in four or five different product lines now, and by this point you know the drill. Text and properly optimized images are hugely improved in the move from the 1024×768, 162 PPI display of the old mini to the 2048×1536, 324 PPI display of the new one. Fine lines and details (like those used all over the place in iOS 7) are cleaner and easier to discern. Retina iPads have been around for almost two years at this point (has it really only been two years?), and it's hard to find an app that doesn't benefit in some way from the increased pixel density.
Andrew Cunningham
Individual pixels are difficult to resolve on the Retina mini's 324 PPI screen, even close up.
I'm reading on my tablet the vast majority of the time, so nice sharp text was the single feature I was most looking forward to on the new iPad mini. The screen doesn't disappoint. Whether you're reading a full-size magazine page, browsing non-mobile websites, or just making the text as tiny as possible in the Kindle app for kicks, things are much clearer and easier to read. It's possible to go back to the old iPad mini, but the screen looks like a Retina iPad mini with a thin layer of Vaseline smeared on it. Text on the Retina mini looks just as great as it does on the Kindle Fire HDX or 2013 Nexus 7, which have near-identical pixel densities of 323 PPI. Differences in the way each platform renders its fonts is going to have a more substantial impact on your reading experience than differences between the displays.
When watching movies or TV shows, apparent quality is a little more dependent on your source material. Things are unquestionably nice-looking on the Retina iPad mini, though factors like brightness, color accuracy, and contrast will alter your viewing experience more (they're all good on the mini's display, though AMOLED fans will miss that display technology's deeper blacks). Here, the Nexus 7 is a close match for the mini since most video is well-suited to its widescreen aspect ratio, and its wide top and bottom bezels make it very easy to hold in portrait mode. The Kindle Fire HDX provides a similar viewing experience but is more limited in the media libraries it has access to—Apple's iTunes library is not to be discounted on this front, and the iPads can access the Amazon Video service, while the Fire couldn't get into the iTunes Store in its wildest dreams.
Compared to the iPad Air, colors on our Retina mini's screen looked just a bit more muted, but contrast seemed a little better—bear in mind that these observations may or may not apply to the iPad you buy, since Apple usually buys up displays from multiple sources. As in the Air, there's a slight air gap between the tablet's front glass and the actual LCD panel itself, making the glass and LCD easier to replace individually if either component breaks but reducing contrast and color saturation compared to fused-glass devices like the iPhone 5S or the 2013 Nexus 7. The problem is exacerbated by direct sunlight.
Finally, there have been rumors that image retention or "ghosting" problems with the screen are limiting supply of the Retina iPad minis. Using Marco Arment's handy image retention test as directed revealed no such ghosting on our review unit, but other reports from around the Internet (includingone from Arment himself) indicate that some units are having problems with it. Note that image retention is temporary, unlike the "burn-in" that some CRT and plasma screens can suffer from. Apple and others have had problems with this sort of thing before—it's usually worked out as production processes and component supplies improve, but it's something early adopters should watch out for.
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