“There is nothing as amazing as this,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing said when announcing the product, saying that it’s as thin as a pencil and as light as a pad of paper.
The iPad Mini screen measures 7.9 inches diagonally, which is about 2 inches smaller than the iPad. It is 7.2mm thick, about the width of a pencil. At .68 pounds, it’s about half the weight of the fourth generation iPad.
The iPad Mini has a front-facing HD camera for FaceTime, and a 5-megapixel iSight camera on the back that can shoot video in 1,080p. The tablet comes equipped with a dual-core A5 processor, the same processor that’s in the iPad 2.
Unlike the third-generation iPad (announced earlier this year) and fourth-generation iPad (announced on the same day as the Mini), the iPad Mini is not equipped with Apple’s highly touted Retina display. The 1,024 x 768 display is identical to that of the iPad 2’s.
But unlike the iPad 2, the iPad Mini comes with Apple’s new Lightning connector, the same 5-pin connector that’s that found on the iPhone 5 and fourth-generation iPad.
The WiFi versions of the iPad Mini, which is available in 16-, 32- and 64-gigabyte models, range from $329 to $519. LTE connectivity is an additional $130. Apple will begin taking iPad Mini orders on Friday, and the WiFi models will begin shipping on November 2, according to the Associated Press.
