Prepare your wallets, mortgage your house, and start looking for odd jobs around the neighborhood, because Apple's new iPad mini with Retina display looks to be one of the must-have gadgets of the year. By combining a small frame with a faster processor and a better screen, Apple's taken everything we loved about the original Mini and pumped it up a few notches to keep the tablet competitive against the Android tablets slowly invading its turf. We've already extensively compared two such tablets—Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX and Google's new Nexus 7—but it's time to throw the iPad Mini into the fight and see how it fares against these two 7-inch juggernauts when it comes to specs, price, and ecosystem.
Specs ain't nothing but a number
Much as with phones, quad-core processors are the standard in top-tier tablets these days. Last year's iPad mini had the same dual-core processor as the iPad 2, making it a little long in the tooth even when the tablet first launched. With this year's iPad mini, however, Apple's given the tablet a significant boost in processing power. The new mini has the same A7 processor you'll find in the iPhone 5s and the full-sized new iPad, making it capable of running pretty much any app in the App Store. Although it's still only a dual-core processor, chances are you won't notice the difference in performance between the new iPad mini and any of the quad-core Android tablets currently out. Our tests show the A7 is wicked fast.
The biggest upgrade comes in the form of the mini's new Retina display. It's the same resolution as the Retina display on the full-sized iPad, giving you roughly the same pixel density you get out of both the new Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HDX—both of which have awesome displays. While you'll still want to go with a larger 10-inch tablet for reading comic books and magazines, the high-resolution screens on these three tablets make them ideal for reading or watching videos on the go.
Simply comparing specs, the iPad mini seems well positioned against the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HDX. The three tablets are all roughly the same size and should all offer the same performance, judging from their respective innards. But, as we've seen so many timesin the past, there's more to a device than just specs.
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