The iPad mini has landed: Your questions answered

The iPad mini has landed in our grubby little hands. We’re roasting piles of coffee beans for what will be a marathon of a review (check for it on Monday!), but we’ve already received numerous reader questions about the device. I put out a call on various social networks for questions earlier this week, and Ars readers gave me plenty to work with.

While I won’t be able to answer many of the questions until I’m able to perform a full review, we thought it would be nice to answer a handful of the easier ones now in order to sate your appetite for iPad mini info. So here are answers to nine questions I received about the iPad mini. Feel free to add more questions in the comments, and I’ll do my best to address them in the full review.

Will the iPad mini support multitouch gestures, such as four-finger swipe on the full-sized iPad?

Yes—the iPad mini is still just an iPad, after all. Like Apple’s other, full-sized iPads, the iPad mini does support a wide range of multitouch gestures. This includes four- or five-finger vertical swipes to show/hide the task bar at the bottom of the screen, four- or five-finger horizontal swipes to quickly switch between recent apps, and four- or five-finger pinches to return to the home screen from an app. When I tested this, the multitouch functionality worked in exactly the same way as it does on my third-generation iPad.

But that’s not all. Apple actually tweaked its multitouch technology for iOS 6 in order to work better with the iPad mini—in particular, how the display reacts to your fingers that may be hanging over the edge thanks to the smaller bezel around the screen. How so? I’ll answer that toward the end of the next question…

Does the smaller bezel around the screen impact how you hold the device?

There are many questions related to the size of the shrunken bezel around the iPad mini’s display. Indeed, there is virtually no bezel around the edge—at least compared to the full-size iPad—making users wonder: how am I supposed to hold it?

I find the change doesn’t offer too many challenges, because of the shape, size, and weight of the iPad mini. With the full-size iPad being as “heavy” as it is, you often find yourself holding it with your thumb firmly gripped to the front bezel. But the iPad mini is significantly lighter, at 0.68 pounds, while the full-sized iPad is more than twice that weight at 1.44 pounds. Because of this weight difference, it’s much easier to rest the iPad mini on your palm/fingers with one hand, with your thumb only lightly wrapped around the edge for balance. During my initial usage, I didn’t find my thumb needing to grip around the front like I do with the full-sized iPad, and this was mostly due to the weight difference.

But as we all know, not everyone uses devices in the same way. If you’re the type who does like to have a thumb firmly wrapped around the front, you might still be worrying about that skinny bezel. This is where Apple’s tweaks to multitouch come in. As Apple wrote on its own iPad mini design page:

Rethinking the screen meant we also had to rethink the software behind it. iPad mini intelligently recognizes whether your thumb is simply resting on the display or whether you’re intentionally interacting with it. It’s the kind of detail you’ll notice—by not noticing it.

What does this mean in non-marketing terms? As iDownloadBlog detailed in October, iOS 6 is capable of detecting a resting thumb along the edge so that it doesn’t inhibit touch-based activities you might be doing with your other hand.

For example, if your thumb happens to be hanging over the edge onto the display, but you want to scroll through a Web page with your other hand, nothing is stopping the operating system from understanding what you’re trying to do. When I tested this myself, it worked just as described, as long as my “balancing” thumb wasn’t too far onto the screen. As long as my resting thumb was roughly halfway onto the screen or less, scrolling or performing other multitouch activities with my free hand worked as expected.

Are apps identical between a 9.7-inch iPad and an iPad mini?

The iPad mini runs apps at the same resolution as the full-sized iPad 2. Both devices run at 1024×768—it’s just that the iPad 2 has a 9.7-inch screen while the iPad mini’s screen is only 7.9 inches. Because Apple is still selling the iPad 2 as a current-but-discounted device to new iPad owners, both it and the iPad mini basically run the exact same apps from the App Store. As such, the UI on apps will appear smaller, but not functionally different from on the iPad 2.

Third-party developers aren’t prompted to discern between a full-sized iPad and an iPad mini—they only develop apps for “retina” resolutions (third- and fourth-generation iPads) or not (iPad 2 and iPad mini). So, any app that you might run on a full-sized iPad 2 will be identical in features when run on the iPad mini. But if you’re comparing between the iPad mini and, say, a fourth-generation iPad, there might be some differences, because the latter may be running an app that has been updated for the retina display.

Are smallish buttons harder to hit for us fat-fingered users?

It’s true that the overall UI is shrunken down a bit on the iPad mini when you compare it against a 9.7-inch iPad. As I wrote above, apps that work on the iPad 2 will look and behave pretty much the same way on the iPad mini, but they’ll be a bit smaller. And I really mean “a bit.” During my initial testing, I didn’t find that small UI elements were significantly harder to hit the first time, whether I was clicking on links or tapping on buttons.

However, I can imagine there being potential problems with some UI elements—particularly on webpages, which can sometimes shrink things down to near-untappable levels, even on a full-size iPad. In that case, there may be a lot of zooming into webpages in your future, but I don’t believe it will present much of a usability difference within native apps.

How is typing on the smaller screen?

The iPad mini’s size makes it fall somewhere between an iPhone and a full-sized iPad when it comes to typing. As I wrote in my hands-on after the iPad mini event, I find it surprisingly easy to type on the iPad mini in portrait mode with my thumbs—holding it with both hands, it’s not hard to thumb around the keyboard like you would on an iPhone in order to type out a message. In fact, typing this way might be a bit easier on the iPad mini than the iPhone, since the iPhone’s keyboard can be quite small in portrait mode.

Landscape mode is a slightly different story. I didn’t find that it was easy at all to type in the same way using my thumbs. But when you put the device down on your lap or desk, or prop it up slightly with the iPad mini’s smart cover, you can type like you would on a normal keyboard with both hands. The keyboard is smaller than a laptop’s keyboard or even the full-sized iPad’s keyboard in landscape mode—that’s kind of a given.

The on-screen keys on the iPad mini look to be about 3/4 of the size of the keys on my third-generation iPad. It’s a bit more cramped than what you might be used to, but I personally didn’t find it to be significantly hindering when typing this way. But this, I think, is highly subjective. It’s certainly something to keep in mind—especially if you have big hands.

Is the rear-facing camera sharp enough for scanning documents?

The iPad mini’s rear-facing camera is 5 megapixels, just like the iPhone 4 introduced in 2010. It has the same tap-to-focus and tap-for-exposure functionality that you might already be used to with your other iOS devices, too. When I tested taking a photo of a check to deposit via the Chase app, it worked just fine—similar to how the app works on my iPhone.

I don’t do a lot of document scanning with my iDevices (aside from the aforementioned check-scanning scenario), but it wasn’t significantly different from any other iOS device I’ve used. The images came out sharp enough, but keep in mind that if you’re a megapixel sizequeen, there are other devices (such as the iPhone 5) that can take images at higher resolutions than the iPad mini.

How is the brightness and color accuracy compared to a full-size iPad?

Compared to my third-generation iPad, the iPad mini’s screen seems ever-so-slightly brighter when both devices are cranked to their maximum brightness. The screen on the iPad mini is also slightly more bluish than that of my third-gen iPad, but not to the point where I would notice such a difference if I wasn’t looking at the two devices side-by-side.

In terms of color saturation and accuracy, my initial assessment is that they look extremely similar. There are some very subtle differences when looking at the same photograph side-by-side—the iPad mini appears to be just a bit more saturated—but I wouldn’t call it enough for most people to notice without guidance.

Is it bulky or thin compared to other iPads, iPhone 5?

The iPad mini’s dimensions are 7.87″ x 5.3″ x 0.28″ (or 0.29″ for Wi-Fi + Cellular). By comparison, the fourth-generation iPad is 9.5″ x 7.31″ x 0.37″, and the iPhone 5 is 4.87″ x 2.31″ x 0.30″. So, in terms of thickness, the iPad mini is indeed technically the thinnest of the three devices—its thickness rivals that of the iPhone 5, and is actually just a couple hundredths of an inch thinner.