- I bought my iPad Mini 2 last month. It came with iOS 8.0.2 installed and I haven't upgraded at this stage. Not sure if I should just yet.
- It runs fairly smoothly however there are a couple of notable glitches, one in the Notes app and one in Safari.
- 32gb is a must. I've installed a few apps, not a huge number of them, and added some MS documents and I'm already down to 16gb. 🙁 And that's without any music or movies loaded. A 16gb Mini would leave you with no space for anything else, so I highly recommend that people go for at least 32gb.
- I like being able to use MS Word and Excel on an iPad. Awesome! And its free too. 😀
- Retina display is great!
- Battery life is rather good - that is after going through a couple of power cycles and also ensuring no unnecessary background services etc were running.
- I bought a Mercury Goospery case - with smart cover function and card holders for USD17. Smart looking too. Bought 2 of them in-store but you can get them online for around USD10.
If the Mini 4 has an extra gig of RAM then I would go for that. If not then defo go for the Mini 2, or the Mini 3 if it comes down, considerably, in price.
I used a mini 2 on 8.1 and on 8.3, I noticed a marked speed improvement, a battery life improvement, and elimination of some bugs in notes, Safari, the keyboard, and multitouch gestures. Opens apps much quicker, much smoother operation.
From 8.1 to 8.3, also noticed an increase in available storage. Capacity increased by a GB or two. I noticed there are many, many apps installed, including Microsoft office. Overall, there is 7.6GB consumed by installed apps, music, and photos, and 4.3GB left. This is on a 16GB.
I don't see many users using up the whole storage of a 16gb iPad. With a 32GB, you would frankly be wasting money on 16GB more storage that you would never use.
If I buy a mini 2 refurb, think it'll come with an earlier version of iOS 8?
Yes, it'll probably have iOS 8.2, and might have 8.1. But iOS 8.3 brings such a huge performance increase over every other iOS 8 version, and fixes basically every single bug in iOS 8. You'd be incredibly foolish if you did not update!!!
I recommend getting an iPad, if you need or want an iPad now. (I don't need an iPad). I recommend getting it on sale or refurbished. Any iPad with an A7 chip or better will keep fast performance for a very long time. And apple supports its products for a very long time.
1GB is plenty, iOS 8.3 optimizes it even more. Can keep many webpages and apps in the background. And when an app or webpage needs to load again, wait a split second. But this doesn't happen often.
Don't decide to wait for 2GB unless you've actually used an iPad mini 2 with iOS 8.3. 2GB isn't very necessary.
And, if you wait until fall for the iPad mini 4, would you want to pay $400 for it, or pay $250 for the iPad mini 2?