Apple's fifth diminutive iPad - the iPad Mini (2019) - arrived with little fanfare but thanks to the Apple Pencil, it's the biggest shift since the series started. With 3.5 years since the last Mini upgrade in 2015, at first glance, it looks like nothing has changed. But Apple has, in fact, deigned to bring a lot of iPhone and iPad Pro features and specs to its tiny tablet.
The big Mini news is that it now supports Apple's Pencil. It's not an exaggeration to say the neat Bluetooth stylus could completely change what you actually use the iPad Mini for; the experience of using this is now even further away from something like the Amazon Fire HD 8 or a regular Android tablet. That means jotting stuff down in the Notes app or reminding yourself of just how good the creative, made-for iPad apps are - whether it's pro software like Procreate and Adobe's apps or more amateur fare like Pixelmator, Doodle Book or - don't judge us - Marvel Colour Your Own. It's still in a class of its own.
This is also where the screen upgrades come into their own. Like the fourth-gen iPad Mini, it's a 7.9-inch, 2048 x 1536 display with the classic iPad 4:3 ratio. So it's still 326ppi, i.e. the highest pixel density you can get on an iPad. This time, there's a 25 per cent boost in brightness to 500 nits - the iPad Mini's not quite as bright as an iPhone, but still plenty bright in use both indoors and out.
Next to last year's 9.7-inch iPad, which is looking increasingly long in the tooth, the Mini's display is very crisp and, when streaming Roma on Netflix, the contrast is also noticeably improved. That's no doubt in part down to the addition of Apple's True Tone technology, which uses sensors to tweak the white balance to your ambient lighting. Plus the new laminated display keeps things looking perfectly polished. Pencil aside, tablets are still all screens and this one remains the best.
All that said, we have a bad case of The Wrong Pencil. Like the latest iPad Air, the new iPad Mini is only compatible with the £89 first generation Apple Pencil. It doesn't support the magnetic automatic charging and pairing you get with the brilliant second-gen Pencil and an iPad Pro. Instead, the taller, rounder Pencil is very usable (see above) but it does feel slightly large when paired with the Mini. It clearly wasn't designed for this size of device.
This also means that, unlike on the iPad Pro, the Pencil is loose, unattached - we almost left it at home more than once. To pair and charge, you pop the top off and stick it in the Lightning port, which is quick and painless, if a bit awkward. In other words, first-gen Pencil is great; second-gen would have been better. And on a similar note, there's also no Apple Smart Keyboard for the iPad Mini, but there's plenty of third-party Bluetooth options available.
Apple's A12 Bionic chip turns the Mini into a real powerhouse - it's the A12X in the iPad Pro - especially compared to rivals at this size. It handles games and photo/video editing apps without a hint of lag and that includes 'multitasking' in iOS 12. What this means is that you can drag a second app into a floating window - not as essential on a 7.9-inch iPad as on larger, laptop-replacement sizes, but at least as useful as it is on big-screen phones.
Our only slight concern - during one quite intensive session, the lower half of the iPad Mini got quite warm when we were hopping between apps, games and note-taking with the Pencil. The Mini getting toasty didn't actually impact performance, though.
The iPad Mini has always been extremely easy to live with - and it still is. Chief among your complaints - if you were minded to find some - is that Apple chose not to redesign the Mini, despite the long three-and-a-half-year gap between releases. Don't get us wrong, it's still the loveliest built 8-inch tablet around, by quite some margin, but the bezels now make it look strangely retro next to an iPad Air (2019) or an iPhone XS Max.
OK, that's us being a bit persnickety. This latest compact iPad is still easy to hold one-handed, light (300.5g for the Wi-Fi model, the iPad Mini 4 is 299g) and slim at just 6.1mm thick. It comes in silver, space grey and gold. There's the same decent-if-not-spectacular 8MP f/2.4 camera on the rear, with auto HDR and autofocus, with an upgraded 7MP f/2.2 front camera, which will indeed give you sharp, clear video calls. Even the headphone jack is still in place on the top edge.
Ditto the home button because another feature reserved for the iPad Air and iPad Pro is Face ID. Here you get fast Touch ID, for unlock and payments, via a fingerprint sensor on the home button, but again we're at the stage where that's now unusual for an Apple product. As per the Pencil, it's fairly obvious that Cupertino is holding back these minor features so it can charge more for them on its higher-than-high-end iPads and drip feed them over the next few years.
Apple cites ten hours of battery life, as per the last iPad Mini. In real world use, as any iPad Mini owner knows, this tends to be much better, standby is really very good and it'll probably only need charging two or three times a week or so, depending on how you use it. That said, if you do crank up that screen brightness to the max 500 nits, and use it nonstop, the new Mini's battery can lose more than 10 to 15 per cent in 30 minutes.
If your choice is between an iPad and an Android tablet, it's also worth a quick note on local storage. The £399 iPad Mini gets you 64GB of storage - if you need more, it's £549 for a 256GB device. That's not quite semi-outrageous, laptop-style prices like the iPad Pro, but still expensive when you compare it to Samsung's Android tablets with expandable microSD storage.
The Pencil compatibility is a real leap for the iPad Mini line. If you don't need the screen and performance boosts, you might be considering sticking with an older iPad Mini model. For us, the Pencil support swings it. Analysts are split on whether tablet (read: iPad) sales are still declining or whether we'll see teensy growth in the next few years.
Either way, Apple has really complicated matters when it comes to selecting which iPad to go for. For small tablets, though, the choice is really between this iPad Mini and tablets half or a third of the price - Amazon Fire HD 8 say or Huawei's 8.4-inch iPad Mini-alike. You already know what we're going to say - it's worth it.
Sure, it would have been grand to see a redesigned Mini, with Face ID, a second-gen (or even a bespoke Mini) Pencil, but perhaps that's all on the cards for 2020? For now, this iPad Mini is a welcome tweak to a winning formula.
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