First the jump from 7.85 going from 162 ppi to 216 ppi is a full extra 54 ppi more. The jump from iPad 2 to Mini is a difference of 30 ppi, some 45% less ppi difference.
That's not how spatial resolution works. The jump from 132 to 163 is about a 23% increase in pixel density. The move from 163 to 216 is about a 31% increase. They are broadly similar gaps.
As you increase in density, you get lower returns. A move from 50 ppi to 100 ppi is a 100% increase. In order to improve by the same margin again, you need an additional 100 ppi. You can't compare the numbers by simple subtraction.
Second you have no clue how Android scales content so it doesn't shrink everything down like it does on iOS do you?
What in the world are you even talking about? You're the one talking about how smaller pixels don't improve usability because there are the same number of pixels. In fact, that is just not true.
Let's say you have a column of text 100 characters wide on a Kindle Fire HD (the tablet I own). That works out to character spaces 8 pixels wide, or 27 characters per inch (0.037"). On the iPad mini, the same 27 characters per inch render at 6 pixels wide--25% less, so they're a bit blockier, but the same size (0.037"). But the display is also over an inch wider, so the line width simultaneously increases to 128 characters--more than 25% more. Yet if you zoom the iPad text in so that you're getting the same 100-character line width, then you're looking at pixels that are 7.7 pixels wide (which would round to 8, or 20 characters per inch (0.05"). In other words, you can get the exact same quality of text on the iPad mini as you can on the Android tablets by zooming in a little, because the screen is physically larger, without losing any content. Hold the iPad mini an inch further away, and the angular size becomes exactly the same.
That's a key advantage of the iPad mini is that you have that choice--if you don't mind blockier text, you can fit a lot more on screen. If you do have a problem with it, you can zoom in a bit to smooth it out, then hold it at a comfortable distance and not be able to see any difference at all. On the flip side, if you want 128 characters to appear on screen on the Kindle/Nexus, that's 34.6 per inch (six pixels wide each--a whopping
0.029"). That's uncomfortably small even with the higher ppi.
You'd need to go full-blown retina (at around 280-300ppi) before that changed significantly. A 20-30% pixel density spread among devices is a matter of a few inches of viewing distance. The Galaxy S3 has worse pixel density than the iPhone, but it doesn't matter in practice.
The problem for the Mini is all of the content gets SCALED down 20% smaller yet its pixel density is not good enough to render things like text in good detail at that size.
Its pixel density is a matching 23% better, meaning it has precisely the clarity of the iPad 2 at the smaller size. Moreover, because its pixels are smaller and closer together, the zoom scaling required to smooth out small text is
lower than the iPad 2.
When you look at your iPhone 4+ small text looks incredible. On the Mini it's terrible.
Yes. That's a retina display for you.
But you're still not answering the question. Look at the side-by-side picture. In what way is the mini worse than the iPad 2? It clearly is not.
