


iPad mini review



Given that the device will mostly be in the bag or pocket (at a stretch) we can see you'll only need to keep the charger handy every two or three days to keep things juiced - barring a marathon gaming session or email reply storm.

ipad mini review

In short, the battery life won't ever give you any nasty surprises on the Wi-Fi version - while we haven't tested the LTE option as yet in our time with other iPads rocking the cellular signal there wasn't a huge amount of power consumption difference, so we're pretty hopeful the same will be true of the smaller-screened iPad mini.


ipad mini review

The iPad mini's two specifications, 3G and Wi-Fi only, and they differ quite a lot in terms of what's on board. The latter is pretty sparse, with only dual-channel Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 on board. We say 'only', but in truth that's quite a decent option for the things you'll want to do with it.


The Bluetooth 4.0 integration is one that's impressed us over time, as it means low power sensors (such as those in healthcare or fitness) can be used with the more portable tablet, which will be great news for doctors who can't convince their patients to buy an iPhone or lug around a larger tablet.

We do have a slight problem with the Bluetooth connection to headphones - weirdly whenever connecting up wirelessly the sound would fall out of sync, before locking back into step with the video in a few seconds. However, every new chapter saw the problem happening again, which was really, really irritating when the same headphones showed no issue on the Nexus 10 tablet.



ipad mini review

The GeekBench score is what we usually use to tell if any new Apple product is up to much, and you'll be glad to know that it's… exactly as powerful as the iPad 2 and the iPad 3.

The latter isn't really a fair test as it's got a much improved GPU running the show to help power all those pixels, but it shows that in terms of CPU grunt there's not a lot to worry about here.
