Retina iPad mini
This sounds like the one I’ve been waiting for, although a 6- or 7-inch version would probably be even better for reading.
Apple says that itty-bitty pixels require greater brightness to look good, and that drains the battery faster. To keep the Mini at 10 hours of juice, Apple had to give it a bigger battery, which makes it 7 percent heavier and slightly thicker than the original Mini (by three tenths of a millimeter, for you caliper-wielding types). You’d notice it, but only if you were holding the original Mini in your other hand for comparison.
Anand Lal Shimpi:I cannot emphasize this point enough. After three days of extensive use of the Mini (a review unit on loan from Apple), it works and feels exactly like the iPad Air. Everything about it is of equivalent or identical quality: the display, the cameras (front and back), the performance, the battery life.
The Retina mini now features a 44% larger battery (23.8Wh). That’s nearly the same battery capacity as the original iPad (25Wh), but in a chassis with only 1/3 of the volume. This is also the highest capacity battery we’ve ever seen in a tablet of this size. The negligible impact on weight and thickness is pretty impressive.
Though the new iPad mini with Retina display is lighter than the iPad Air, it’s actually more dense. Picking up the iPad Air feels a bit like picking up a movie prop; like the iPhone 5 series, it’s almost impossibly light. The Retina iPad mini definitely feels more solid, like a whole lot of technology got packed into a very small space.
Whether you opt for this or the iPad Air comes down to essentially two factors: size and price. If you want the smallest and lightest iPad around, the mini wins, though not by as much as it used to; it’s around three-quarters of a pound to the iPad Air’s 1 pound. Its small size may be even more of a selling point, especially if you want something that’ll travel easily wherever you go: About the size of a trade paperback, the mini can fit comfortably into a purse or a small bag. And even though the new iPad Air is light enough to be held in one hand, the iPad mini still beats it, well, hands-down in that category. In particular, that makes the mini great for reading books or playing many games.
If the LCD panel has an image retention issue, a faint impression of the checkerboard will still be visible on the solid gray image, usually fading over the next few minutes.
Well, I picked up my Retina iPad Mini tonight, and it failed[…]
Here’s his image-retention test page.
