IPad mini (2021) review: it’s time you bought one
Pros
Renewed design
A15 Bionic chip makes everything better
Improved cameras and great features
Vivid color display
Ideal size: neither big nor small
Quick setup; ready to useCons
Low-power speakers
Update rate could be higher
Case with a physical keyboard?Have you never owned an iPad? If you are an iPhone user and also have a MacBook or an iMac, we don’t blame you: it has never been necessary to have an iPad if you are not a designer or artist, someone who needs to “draw” on a screen. Beyond this tool and some others, having an Apple tablet –by the way: the most popular and the best on the market– has been a luxury or whim that soon became unnecessary.
The sixth generation of the iPad mini arrives to change things. No iPhone, iMac, or MacBook user will consider that this gadget is “too much.” Size has a lot to do with it, but that’s nothing new. The difference is in the design, the camera, and the processor, updates that will keep the iPad mini in your hands for longer, perhaps to the detriment – this time yes – of your iPhone, iMac, or laptop.
But how? Why? Fundamentally, because until now, everything you did on an iPad could be done –also and better– on an iPhone, your iMac, or MacBook. If you weren’t a design or art professional, you used the iPad for a while and soon put it aside. Believe us: we know many who have their iPad in a drawer at home.
The iPhone’s increasing quality of the screens and chips made them increasingly suitable for playing games and enjoying videos and streaming. And while you could add a keyboard to iPads, the experience here would never be the same as with a MacBook. Having an iPad to watch series on a plane, read e-books, or check your social networks was always too bulky.
The iPad mini is not only compact and portable like no other has been before. The latest iPad Pro and Air redesign finally gave Apple tablets a more contemporary and desirable look, and the mini now benefits from these tweaks. The home button finally disappears from the front and is located on edge, so the 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display is now appreciated and enjoyed in all its breadth.
Taking it out of the box, turning it on, setting it up, and starting to enjoy it is pretty much the same situation. The battery comes 100 percent charged (that’s how it was in our case), and quick pairing with your iPhone (or other iPad) makes everything even easier. Without any possibility of getting lost, everything on your phone happens, in a few minutes, to be on your new tablet.
The familiarity that this quick setup creates is coupled with the size and weight of the iPad in such a way that, suddenly, it is your iPhone that you put aside. Have you ever walked down the street while using an iPad Pro or even Air? Didn’t you feel that this was too much? Without being huge, the sizes of the other models do not make them as manageable as the iPad mini, especially if you use it with a Smart Folio case, which –by the way– activates the iPad when you open it and puts it to sleep when you close it. . As simple as the blink of an eye.
Everything flows, and everything looks great. And no wonder: with a 500 nit screen and anti-glare coating, True Tone, and full lamination, images and videos look more vivid than ever. The stereo speakers are on both sides when you lay the iPad horizontally. The audio quality is perhaps one of the low points, but we doubt that someone does not pair their Apple tablet with a pair of headphones if what you want is to enjoy better sound.
Inner strength
Everything good about the iPad mini comes from a source called the A15 Bionic chip. Its 6-core CPU offers 40 percent more performance, and the 5-core GPU provides 80 percent more performance than the previous generation iPad mini. The most demanding tasks get done without suffocating, and you will not have time to enjoy games with advanced graphics. Although the refresh rate is not as high as the newly released iPhone 13, it is still an excellent gadget to play with.
Advanced machine learning features are made possible by the 16-core Neural Engine and new CPU machine learning accelerators, enabling machine learning tasks to run twice as fast as the previous generation. This enables things like image recognition and natural language learning.
In the iPadOS 15 operating system, the powerful new Machine learning features include Live Text, which uses the device’s smart technology to recognize text in photos and give users options like translation into seven different languages (Spanish included). And yes, it does translate everything.
Camera
The Centered Framing experience was known for a long time on the iPad Pro, and now it’s available on the iPad mini as well. With this feature, video calls are of a more professional level. Thanks to the improved ultra-wide-angle front camera with a new 12 MP sensor and a much wider angle of view, the Center-Framing functionality automatically adjusts and will follow you if you move. When other people enter the scene, the camera also detects them, zooming out to easily include them in the conversation.
It has been said many times that nobody buys a tablet for their camera, but this seems to be ending. The rear camera of the iPad mini includes a 12 MP sensor with Focus Pixels and a wider aperture to take sharper and more natural photos. In addition, it comes with True Tone flash, so even in low light, your photos will not envy those taken with the phone.
5G
5G may no longer be a novelty at this point, but it is not irrelevant to have this connectivity in the new Apple tablets. With 5G, the iPad mini can reach a maximum of 3.5 Gbps speed in optimal conditions to stay connected and increase your productivity tasks wherever you are.
The IPad mini now comes with a USB-C port for data transfers of up to 5 Gbps, 10 times faster than the previous generation, and connects to various USB-C accessories such as cameras, hard drives, and external monitors up to 4K. We haven’t had a chance to test this, but that port makes the possibilities huge. The only thing that amazes us is that Apple does not normalize USB-C on all its devices and insists, on the contrary, on the Lightning port on its iPhone and iPad.
We said above that there are thousands of iPad abandoned in drawers, full of dust because the functionality of the iPhone and laptops made the use of a tablet redundant due to its size, design, and other characteristics. This changes with the sixth-generation iPad mini, which performs almost as well as the last generation (pen) iPhone, even though everything may look bigger and better. But it is not an exaggerated size: you can easily carry it in a jacket pocket, and no one will look at you strangely if you wear it on the street while you walk.