“I just switched back to the full-sized iPad – in the form of the iPad Air – after over a year of exclusive iPad Mini use,” Charlie Sorrel writes for Cult of Mac. “The Mini is great in many ways, and so you’d think that an A7 Retina-ized version would be even better. But almost since I bought it, the new hi-res Mini has been driving me crazy.”
“Like many nerds, I bought the first Mini just to check it out… I liked it so much I switched to it full time, and gave my old iPad 3 to The Lady,” Sorrel writes. “I ordered the new Mini the day it launched… It’s fat. The cellular Retina Mini is around ten percent heavier than the Wi-Fi-only original, and just a third of a millimeter thicker. This sounds like nothing, but it’s the difference between being pleasantly surprised at its lightness, and disappointment that you’ll have to wait for the next generation for the proper Retina Mini… almost every time I picked it up or pulled off the Smart Case to shed some weight – I’d realize that it just wasn’t that slab of helium-light tech that the first iPad Mini had been.”
“Colors on the Mini are flat and muted. It’s just fine for text, but for video and pictures, it’s just muddy compared to its bigger brother,” Sorrel writes. “The iPad Air feels like the future. It’s the same 7.5mm thick as the Retina Mini, and yet it feels thinner. The whole thing has the same air (forgive me) about it that the original Mini had: when you pick one up you’ll think its a demo model without any electronics inside.”
Read more in the full article here.