Some First And Second Thoughts About The iPad mini (And 4th-Gen iPad) – The ‘Book Mystique

I’m obliged to concede that my initial enthusiasm for a smaller iPad was – how shall we say? – ‘muted’. It’s not that I entirely bought into Steve Jobs’s contention that 7-inch tablets are junk. Google’s Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and even BlackBerry’s PlayBook have all proved that 7 inch tablets can be useful machines.

It’s just that I don’t find the 9.7 inch screen in my iPad 2 any too large most of the time, although I could appreciate any smaller, lighter, machine for mobile work, shooting photos, and such. Thing is, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the original iPad either, when it became evident in early 2010 that Apple was going to build it. I think my original reaction was something like “whaaaat???”

Of course the fact that I’m not an aficionado of touchscreens didn’t help. It took me a little over a year to come around to convincing myself to buy an iPad, and my iPad 2 has proved to be a convenient and useful tool (although not without its frustrations) as well as educational. I still don’t much like touchscreens, but I’ve to a considerable degree made my peace with them as the way the world is going whether I like it or not. The iPad 2 has remained remarkably current, despite an extraordinarily long production run (which continues). The third-gen iPad proved to be something of a sideways upgrade performance-wise, with the extra hardware muscle of its A5X SoC and larger battery pretty much absorbed and cancelled by the demands of the Retina display, which rendered the iPad 3 thicker, heavier, and hotter-running than the iPad 2. I had a hard time seeing that as progress, and it arguably allowed the iPad 2 to remain the iPad performance leader for another 8 months, even getting a quiet running specification upgrade last spring to the downsized 32nm version of the A5 SoC that I’m guessing also powers the new iPad mini.

So now the iPad mini is now reality, and I have to say that in spite of myself, I’ve been getting increasingly more excited about it over the past couple months. My iPad 2 hasn’t missed a beat since I bought it, remaining more attractive to me than the the new Retina display iPad with its attendant power demand overhead, application size bandwidth hogging, and porkier vital statistics. The new 4th-gen iPad is just as big (same dimensions), and actually slightly heavier (by 0.01 pounds), than the 3rd-gen according to Apple’s technical specs. so I’m pleased with Apple’s sticking with 1024×768 resolution and a 4:3 aspect ratio at at 163 ppi for the mini, which will keep all 275,000 existing iPad optimized apps compatible. Consequently, I’ve been more and more intrigued by the potential of the iPad mini as a candidate for replacing my iPad 2, when the time comes. Which could be not far off. My wife needs a tablet, so one strategy would be to hand the iPad 2 off to her and move on to the mini myself. Or conversely, hang on to the iPad 2 myself and give her the mini.

At least that was my provisional thinking. The iPad mini turned out to be pretty much exactly what I was expecting, but what I hadn’t expected was for Apple to also trot out a significantly upgraded full-size iPad along with a significant performance improvement, more about which below. Now I’m torn. At $329, the iPad mini is a bit more expensive than I had hoped, but still represents an excellent value for the engineering, quality, and access to Apple’s iOS software ecosystem that you get. I thought it was plausibly possible that Apple could bring it in at $299, but I think they’ve made a wise and responsible decision in opting not to offer an 8GB price-buster entry level model. Sixteen GB should be just fine. I’m still not even close to filling up my iPad 2’s 16GB after more than a year and a half’s use (although all those fatter app upgrades optimized for the Retina display iPads are not helping conserve storage space).

However, I hadn’t expected announcement of a fourth-generation 9.7-inch iPad version upgrade. That changes the landscape considerably, when I had been anticipating only a switch to the new Apple Lightning dock connector and perhaps some minor specification tweaking. I’m still not convinced that the iPad Retina display isn’t mainly unnecessary eye-candy, but that A6X SoC should address the Retina’s hardware resource hogging issues, but as with touchscreen input in general, I’m going to have to accede to its inevitability in the Apple orchard, further underscored by the announcement of a new 13-inch MacBook Pro at the Oct. 23 Special Event. Especially since Apple has held the line on the 9.7-inch iPad’s entry-level price point. That’s only $170 more than the base mini model.

The gen-4 iPad’s Retina display features the same 2048-by-1536 resolution and 3.1 million pixels, which is four times the number of pixels in an iPad 2 display and a million more than an HDTV.

The big news, IMHO, is the new A6X chip, with a new “X” graphics engine enhanced version of the Apple-designed A6 SoC that was introduced on the iPhone 5, with improved image signal processing built in providing even more Retina-worthy graphics, according to Apple doubling both CPU task performance and graphics performance over the 45nm A5X SoC in the 3rd-gen iPad, plus delivering a claimed two times faster Wi-Fi, and still offering the same battery life as the 3rd-gen unit.

The iPad 4th-gen’s 5-megapixel front-facing iSight camera with ƒ/2.4 aperture five-element lens has been updated from VGA to HD allowing you to take high quality self-portraits, record 720p HD video, and a hybrid infrared filter screens out harmful IR light for more accurate, uniform colors. The cameras also feature a backside illumination sensor. The new machine sports dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) 802.11n Wi-Fi and support for channel bonding, and download speeds of up to 150 Mbps, plus next-generation LTE cellular connectivity. Apple is aggressively pitching the 4th-generation iPad as an enterprise platform.

There’s also Apple’s somewhat controversial Siri “intelligent assistant” that you can talk to and ask questions. All of that makes the 4th-generation iPad more of the upgrade the 3rd-gen should have been, and a much more attractive value for the same money.

Apple has chosen to keep the 16GB iPad 2 available for now at $399, but I’m skeptical that many will choose it over a new iPad mini. No disrespect to the iPad 2. I like mine a lot, and am very satisfied with the value it’s represented and continues to provide. However, the iPad mini should give pretty similar computing performance, but with significantly faster WiFi and a lot better cameras. Frankly, the iPad 2’s cameras are an embarrassment, and have been my main complaint about the machine, but that’s been fixed with the mini iPad, which gets what appears to be the same 5-megapixel iSight camera as the iPad third and fourth generation, with an ƒ/2.4 aperture and a five-element lens, autofocus, tap to focus, tap to set exposure functions, a backside illumination sensor that optimizes display-as-viewfinder performance across the ambient light spectrum from sunlight to candlelight, built-in face detection that automatically balances focus and exposure across up to 10 faces, and shoots full 1080p HD video. Despite its mediocrity, I’ve found myself using the iPad 2’s camera more and more because of its convenience, and expect I’d use the much better camera in the mini even more.

However, a key element of the iPad mini’s anticipated success should be the advantage of the 7.9-inch, 4:3 aspect ratio panel compared with the 7-inch screen at 16:9 aspect ratios of competitors like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. While a difference of 0.9″ doesn’t sound all that significant, Apple’s Phil Schiller noted yesterday that say it actually accounts for nominally 35 percent bigger screen area since you’re dealing with diagonal lengths (21.9 vs. 29.6 square inches), and factoring in the 4:3 aspect ratio results in a whopping 67 percent larger effective image size in portrait orientation when viewing Web pages because of the “letterboxing” you get in that mode with 16:9. Who knew? Of course, one problem with that from a marketing angle is that most of us aren’t geometricians, so to the average consumer, 0.9 inches is going to continue sounding like a piddling amount of difference.

Something more obviously tangible that should favorably impress prospective buyers is the iPad mini’s physical size, weight, and the superior quality of its materials and workmanship. Compared with the full-sized iPad, the iPad mini is 23 percent thinner, 53 percent lighter, and like its seven-inch competitors, it fits in one hand comfortably.

One way Apple has kept the iPad mini’s size so compact is by using proportionally reduced width bezels at the display’s side edges. To prevent a potential annoyance arising from that, the mini’s software intelligently recognizes whether your thumb is simply resting on the display or whether you’re intentionally interacting with it.

Speaking of manufacture and finish quality, the iPad mini’s enclosure, like that of the iPhone 5, is engineered and refined to be even more material-efficient and precise, with tolerances measured in microns, mono-crystalline diamond-cut edges, and rich metallic finishes — reminiscent of a piece of high-end jewelry or a fine Swiss watch (or Swiss Railways train station clock!).

Another aspect where the iPad mini leaps ahead of the iPad 2 is its advanced Wi-Fi performance that Apple claims is up to twice as fast as any previous-generation iPad, with dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) 802.11n Wi-Fi, support for channel bonding, and download speeds that can reach up to 150 Mbps., so it should feel a lot faster than the 2, which itself is no slouch. If you opt for a model with cellular connectivity the mini trumps the iPad 2’s 3G wireless support with 4G LTE. And of course both new iPads get Apple’s new 8-pin Lightning dock connector, replacing the familiar 30-pin connector that dates back to the 2003 iPod. However adapters are available (at extra cost, natch) for USB, SD, HDMI, and VGA connectivity.

Apple has given us plenty to ponder with these new iPads, to say nothing of the rest of the cross-category new product tsunami they unleashed on Tuesday. The cool thing is that much has been added, with very little taken away, save for that 30-pin connector. I’m bemused by the meme that quickly sprung up that this was another “unexciting” Apple product upgrade, and that Apple is losing its innovative touch. I beg to differ. Newsflash: Apple makes premium products and sells them for premium prices, and that in itself is innovative in this industry. As Apple’s Phil Schiller told reporters yesterday following the iPad mini’s keynote debut, he expects consumers to recognize quality and be willing to pay for it. If that’s not you, then you have plenty of other choices.