Apple iPad mini 4
A cut-down tablet, but still a very capable one, with an excellent screen and plenty of storage to justify the price
Asmaller tablet usually means a lower price, but since Apple dropped the price of the regular iPad to £339 earlier this year, you’ll now pay quite a lot more for the current version of the mini.
That might stick in the throat a bit, especially since you don’t get all the power of the full-sized iPad. The mini 4 uses Apple’s older A8 processor, and while it’s no slouch, it’s behind the curve. In the single-core Geekbench test, it scored 1,694 to the iPad’s 2,490, and in the multi-core benchmark it managed 3,058 while the larger tablet raced ahead with a score of 4,204. In GFXBench the disparity was even bigger: the mini managed just 15fps, while the iPad averaged 26fps. In use
it feels perfectly slick – without benchmarks I'd never have noticed the difference. But there’s clearly less headroom for taxing apps and future system updates.
Battery life suffers, too: there’s only room inside for a 5,124mAh battery, and in our tests a charge yielded 10hrs 43mins of video playback before the mini shut down. That’s better than you’ll get from many Android tablets, but a full four hours short of the standard iPad.
The iPad mini 4 certainly has its plus points. The anti-reflective coating and laminated screen of the old iPad Air 2 are no longer present on the standard iPad, but the mini 4 still has them: its screen is more vibrant in bright sunlight, and when you tap and swipe it feels more like you’re touching the actual pixels, rather than a sheet of glass sitting on top of them. And while the mini 4’s display is physically smaller than the iPad’s, it uses the same resolution, so you don’t miss out on any real estate and there’s no issue with app compatibility.
The iPad mini 4 is also superbly portable. While retaining the familiar iPad solidity, it’s astonishingly thin and light, measuring just 6.1mm deep and weighing a feather-light 299g.
Lastly, while the iPad mini 4 isn’t cheap, you don’t get stiffed on the storage. Apple has wisely decided to ditch the smaller capacities, so your £419 now gets you a luxurious 128GB of built-in flash memory. You’d pay a tenner more for a regular iPad with the same amount of storage.
If your main concern is performance then a full-sized iPad (or maybe even an iPad Pro) is still the way to go. However, if small is your thing then you certainly won’t regret stumping up for this stylish and capacious tablet.