iPad mini 40% more expensive and 30% less pixels per inch

[SpyderBite]

could easily go buy one and I am sure there will be plenty available at the stores.

Most stores here in the east coast sold out of minis inside of 2 hours and are now on an "order online at 10pm" first come first serve style system as the iPhone 5.

I don't think "plenty" is the word you were looking for.

And despite the price, it is obvious that people are still eager to buy them.

But since we're spouting useless opinions.. I dislike Martin Short as an actor.

 

[Moneymiike420]

I'm not trying to defend Apple here, I think the mini was a poor effort because of the screen. At $329 they should put a higher resolution screen in to differentiate themselves.
But in all other areas I think the mini's fine.
Glass is glass, you drop it, it's going to break, one way or the other.
Benchmarks don't mean crap. You use a 7" tablet to browse the web, check emails and access facebook for goodness sake, not to render Avatar. It's all about a smooth experience on tablets, not about the quad core processor or the 1000 more geekbench points in it. IMO browsing the web and facebook and email and books are far smoother and overall a better experience on iOS than Android - better web rendering, software polish, developer support and ecosystem.
On top of that, if you want to play games on the thing (and hence why you want a better processor) - well most games aren't optimized on Android, but they are on iOS. Add to that consideration the fact that the A5 GPU is better than Tegra 3's.
All together, the Tegra 3 vs. A5 argument in the Nexus 7 vs. iPad mini debate is moot. A quad core processor on Nexus 7 brings no benefits over the weaker A5 on the mini.

Well said

 

[jon3543]

The iPad mini is 60% more expensive and has 30% less pixels per inch than the nexus 7. Someone at Apple seriously lost touch with what made Apple so loved... innovation. The iPad mini is obviously a step backward if it isn't even putting up a higher resolution than $200 7" tablets.

All the current small tablets look fairly bad when displaying insanely small text, as you find when viewing full-size web sites like cnn.com in portrait mode. All need to be rotated into landscape mode and/or zoomed to be easily readable and usable, and that's not going to change a whole lot even with a Retina-quality display, especially the usability aspect. It is disappointing that Apple didn't better them in this area, and I hope they beat the others to market with a Retina Mini, which should be the replacement for the iPad 2.

At larger font sizes, like the default in iBooks, the Mini does a perfectly fine job IMO. I think the Mini actually wins overall due to its larger size and squarer aspect ratio, which lets it display more in landscape mode. All these small tablets require one to go to landscape or zoom to display good-looking text on full-size web pages, and people would do well to keep all these things in mind, because it's not quite so simple as 216 > 163.

Consider this. A 7" 16:10 tablet's screen is 3.7" wide. The 7.85" 4:3 iPad Mini is 4.7" wide. Assuming they're displaying the same web page in the same way, i.e. scaled horizontally to fit, the characters on the 7" tablets are 3.7/4.7 or 79% the size of the Mini's. Just to keep the arithmetic simple, assume a character is 1" wide on the Mini, which then has 163 pixels in which to render it. That same character would be .79" wide on the Kindle/Nexus, and .79*216 PPI = 170 pixels. So the effective resolution in this scenario is even worse than I guessed yesterday at "180-190 PPI"! It's basically the same as the Mini's, and the fidelity of the font rendering isn't any better in this scenario; the text is just smaller, making it even harder to read.

 

[zhenya]

Consider this. A 7" 16:10 tablet's screen is 3.7" wide. The 7.85" 4:3 iPad Mini is 4.7" wide. Assuming they're displaying the same web page in the same way, i.e. scaled horizontally to fit, the characters on the 7" tablets are 3.7/4.7 or 79% the size of the Mini's. Just to keep the arithmetic simple, assume a character is 1" wide on the Mini, which then has 163 pixels in which to render it. That same character would be .79" wide on the Kindle/Nexus, and .79*216 PPI = 170 pixels. So the effective resolution in this scenario is even worse than I guessed yesterday at "180-190 PPI"! It's basically the same as the Mini's, and the fidelity of the font rendering isn't any better in this scenario; the text is just smaller, making it even harder to read.

I don't generally disagree with your post, but characters and assets are rendered independent of pixel density on both iOS and Android.