Tell me if you love your iPad Mini

I am thinking about picking up an iPad mini because I like the snack-size of it and figure it will be good for reading on and good for the kids to accidentally discover inappropriate material on while browsing YouTube. Also. It would be fun for games that my iPhone is too tiny for.

So, a few months on, how are you Mini owners enjoying your tablets - or not? How do you feel it compares in use case to a full sized iPad? Other comments welcome!

Ps. While I appreciate Android tablets for a variety of reasons I don't want to change ecosystems.

DON'T FAIL ME, BROKEN FORUM!

Have you seen this guy? He wants an iPad mini! <shun>

I know ChuckJ has an iPad mini. Perhaps he will offer some insights.

I would offer my thoughts but I have the maxi iPad. So far I haven't found it too big for any activity. My main concern was reading but I've come to like the large display enough that my Kobo ereader seems way too small now. I do need to prop the iPad when reading but it's not really a hindrance.

Really? Interesting! How is it not too big? Er, that makes kinda no sense, sorry, but I would love to hear more reflections on your observation, Creole Ned (or anyone who agrees. Or not).

Get one of those cases that folds into a stand. I use that on the big tablet when reading comic books, and it's great in many situations (and I pop it out and use it naked in the others.)

I have the Logitech keyboard/case combo and it works well when I have the iPad on a table. I need to prop it up when I'm reading in bed but that's easy enough since my body makes a lumpy if serviceable stand. I can hold the iPad comfortably with one hand this way. So far I have not found it uncomfortable in terms of weight/size nor have I been bothered by reading an LCD screen for an hour or two at a time.

I love mine...absolutely LOVE mine. I use it all the time. Reading news in the morning, gaming, it has replaced a Nook and a Kindle, it sits next to me while playing Guild Wars so I can look things up, I can surf while watching TV, I use it for HBO GO and streaming Amazon Video (sadly I no longer have Netflix), I ready my PC Gamer magazine every month and I have a subscription to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and....ok there that should be enough.

Couple all of that with the size (7.9 is much better for movies and magazines) and weight- weighs less than my kindle with a cover...seriously it is a no brainer.

Gawd I sound like one of "those guys"...but really I never used my Kindle Fire like this - had it for a year and I used the iPad more in a week than a year of the Kindle.

Never buy the first apple anything.

So I went to the shop today to have a look and side-by-sided the mini with an iPad. Other than the obvious differences I really noticed that the non-retina mini screen was noticeably blurry on text and it really bugged me.

Might wait a while before I jump the gun either way. Thanks for the tips guys!

This part confuses me. How is a smaller screen better for movies and magazines?

I think he means better than the typical 7 inch screens. I can see that for magazines but I'm pretty sure the typical Android screen sizes are better for movies. I don't know much about those kinds of things though so I could be wrong.

I absolutely love it. I'm not the best example, since I already have an iPad 3 and I tend to have a kind of psychotic break whenever Apple releases a new product. But I think it's fantastic, and I use it almost exclusively now.

The larger iPad is still better for comic books (the screen clarity makes a huge difference with small text) and some of the more involved games (bigger stuff like Baldur's Gate, or board games with complicated boards and/or smaller text). It was kind of ridiculous for me to get a mini when I already had a full-sized one, so I could only justify getting the 16 GB. But I haven't been all that careful with storage, and it still has a few gigs left over -- still, bigger downloads go on the larger one. In general, it feels like the mini is squarely in the "media consumption" camp (although I have used it for journal writing and blog post writing), while the iPad feels slightly more computer-like.

Even knowing from experience about version 1 of Apple products, and knowing that a higher-resolution display is probably in the works, and it being a basically unnecessary purchase for me, it still only took about 20 minutes holding it to get over whatever buyer's remorse I had. It just feels right to me: good size, perfect weight, and a build quality that reminds me of the original iPhone. I've gotten in the habit of carrying it everywhere.

I can definitely tell the difference between the mini's resolution and the resolution of the iPad 3, but it's only a problem with very small pre-rendered text. Kindle & iBooks, Chrome & Safari, Flipboard, Tweetbot, and magazines from the Newsstand app all look perfectly clear and legible -- and reading Flipboard on the thing is just somehow more enjoyable than it is on the larger iPad.

Two things finally swayed me: First, I've been doing a lot of flying for work, and no matter how big of a 1st World Problem it is, holding up the full-sized iPad for reading gets to be a pain after a couple of hours. I had two flights in a row where I'd propped the iPad up on the tray table to watch a movie, and each time the person in front of me kept adjusting his seat, knocking the iPad over. With the iPad mini, I can hold it comfortably in one hand and still do everything I used the larger one for. And even when I'm not flying, I've been using it a lot more than I used the larger one, simply because I like using it more.

And the second thing was that the resale value of Apple products is still very strong; I've gotten at least 75% of the price I paid for every iPad or MacBook I've sold. So if they suddenly announce a "retina" version of the mini, I'll probably be in pretty good shape to upgrade.

Any 7-8 inch tablet with a decent processor is amazing regardless of ecosystem. The lightness allows you to just carry it everywhere.

The 16:10 display of a typical 7" tablet is closer to the aspect ratio of a 16:9 TV show (movies are all over the place, so we'll just use 16:9 as a base) than the Mini's 4:3. BUT: The Mini's extra screen size actually overwhelms that effect.

A 7" 16:10 display gives you 19.8 sqinches of 16:9 video area; a 7.9" 4:3 display gives you 22.4. (A 7.9" 16:10 display would give you 25.2.)

On the other hand, a 7" 1280x800 display can give you a full 720p resolution for 16:9 content, whereas the iPad Mini is limited to a downscaled 1024x575. So it's a size vs. resolution trade-off for movies as for other content.

I ment to say - compared to the standard 7 inch tablet screen. I was definitely not clear there.


Also as far as not ever buying the first Apple anything, that really is a good point. The rumors of a mini-2 in march with a retina screen are already swirling around. That said, if they do that they need to keep the weight the same- the weight factor in the mini is, at least for me, a huge selling point. Oh and since the wife totally covets my mini, when they do upgrade, she gets the current one and I get the new one- so yeah win win for me.

I think you can also put me in the apple fan boy camp but I bought the mrs a mini for Christmas. I've barely been able to touch it since. I have an ipad 3 and the lack of retina display on the mini is the only fault I personally have with it, the mrs doesn't care. The ipad 3 was too big and too heavy for her and she loves the mini, the weight, or lack thereof just about compensates for the lack of retina for me but it is noticeable.