iPad Mini starts at $329, is thinner than a pencil
"This isn't just a shrunken down iPad," says Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, as he showed off the all new iPad Mini during Apple's media event on Tuesday. "It's an entirely new design."
The iPad Mini is 7.2 millimeters thin, that's about as thin as a pencil. It weights 0.68 pounds, which is as light as a standard pad of paper. The tablet is a 7.9-inch device with a 1024 768 pixel resolution. "Easy to remember. 7.9, 9.7," says Schiller, comparing the measurements of the iPad Mini and the regular iPad.
There's a dual-core A5 chip, a FaceTime HD camera in the front, a 5MP iSight camera in the back, a Lightning connector, and all the usual iPad guts, of course. According to Schiller, the iPad Mini has a 10-hour battery life. (This is about on par with the battery life Google advertises for the Nexus 7, for reference.)
Schiller took several jabs at Google's popular 7-inch tablet. Pointing out that, unlike the Nexus 7, the iPad Mini comes with a huge variety of apps specially designed for tablets, rather than a bunch of scaled-up phone apps.
"We took the time to create a product that was a concentration of, but not a reduction of, the original product," Apple's senior vice president of industrial Design, Jony Ive, pointed out in a video shown during the media event.
Like the iPad, the iPad Mini has a line of accessories such as Apple's Smart Covers.
The iPad Mini starts at $329 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only mode. 32Gb and 64 GB Wi-Fi-only models are available for $429 and $529, respectively, while the LTE-capable counterparts are priced at $459, $559, and $659, for the 16GB, 32GB, and 63GB versions, respectively.
Pre-orders start on Oct. 26. The Wi-Fi-only models will ship a week later, on Nov. 2. The LTE-enabled models will ship about two weeks later.
