THE Apple iPad mini 2

Physical Design and WirelessThe mini 2 $249.99 at eBay is superficially identical to the original mini. If you look really closely, you'll find that it's ever so slightly thicker (.01-inch) and ever so slightly heavier (by less than an ounce) to accommodate a larger battery for the new high-res screen. At 7.87 by 5.3 by 0.29 inches (HWD) and 11.68 ounces, it'll still fit in old iPad mini cases.

The difference between the mini and the Air is really about size and price, not weight. I just held both tablets in my hands, and now that the Air is only four ounces more, the weight difference between the two tablets doesn't feel meaningful.

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The mini 2 still has the 4:3 aspect ratio, which makes it compatible with iPad apps, but noticeably thicker—and less usable one-handed—than the competing Samsung Galaxy Tab S and the Nvidia Shield Tablet$299.00 at Amazon. Its metal-and-glass construction is tightly elegant, with a shiny chamfered edge around the corner. The narrow side bezel echoes the iPad Air's, and like the Air, it comes in silver and space gray.

The 7.9-inch, 2,048-by-1,536-pixel IPS LCD touch screen is bright and sharp. It's the exact same resolution as the iPad Air, but in a higher pixel density—324ppi to the Air's 253, almost the same density as the iPhone 5s$539.95 at Amazon. All of the screen elements are slightly smaller than they are on the Air, something you notice in productivity apps with lots of tiny screen elements like iPhoto. They're still usable, but you need slightly sharper eyes and fingers than you do on the big iPad.

The mini comes in a dual-band, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi version and a universal cellular version that works with all U.S. carriers. Every mini is unlocked, even if it comes with a SIM card installed, Apple told me. Wi-Fi performance was good, but not quite as good as the iPad Air. Testing against a Meraki MR16$464.33 at Amazon router through a metal door, I saw 13-14Mbps down on the mini but 18-19Mbps down on the Air. Bluetooth 4.0 is also on board; the cellular version, but not the Wi-Fi-only version, has GPS.

Battery life was 6 hours, 8 minutes playing video with the screen set to max brightness. That's just about the same as the iPad Air, but far short of the Galaxy Tab S.

Performance and MultimediaThe iPad mini has a 1.3GHz Apple A7 processor, the same speed as the iPhone 5s and slightly slower than the Air's 1.4GHz. It scored slightly slower on the Geekbench and Sunspider benchmarks than the Air did, but matched the Air's result on the Browsermark browser test and on the GFXBench graphics test. Although all the current, leading Android tablets outpace the iPad mini 2 (and for that matter, the mini 3) on processor tests, the iPads' Safari browser showed superior results on the browser tests, and it beat the Editors' Choice Samsung Galaxy Tab S (but not the latest Nvidia and Google tablets) on graphics tests.

There's no iPad mini version with the much faster A8X processor that you find in the iPad Air 2. But accelerometer-based games like Asphalt 8: Airborne and Need for Speed: Most Wanted are actually more playable here than on the Air, because it's easier to handle and tilt the smaller device. iPhoto and iMovie also work smoothly.

The M7 motion coprocessor also makes an appearance here. Apple showed me how diary app Day One, for instance, can monitor how much you walk or travel with the iPad in your bag.

iOS is still a simple grid of icons that is passionately focused on touch. And iCloud remains an important component to the OS, especially for backing up your data. Read our in-depth iOS 8 review for the full details. 

The mini's 5-megapixel main camera and 1.2-megapixel front camera are the same as the original iPad Air's. I noticed that when shooting side by side, the big iPad sometimes selected slightly higher ISOs—64 as opposed to 50, 500 as opposed to 400—making the big iPad's photos a little brighter, but just a touch noisier. The HDR mode also still doesn't do much; a bright sky will blow out in any image. I'm really splitting hairs here, though. These are very good cameras, for a tablet.

Like the Air, the mini 2 has a pair of bottom-ported speakers. While the speaker grilles are smaller than the Air's, they generated almost exactly the same volume: 86 or 87 decibels at six inches. Also like on other iPads, if you want to play your video on a TV, you can use a $49 HDMI adapter cable or Apple's proprietary wireless streaming system, AirPlay.

The mini 2 now only comes in 16 and 32GB models, for $299 and $349. Adding LTE for any of the four major carriers costs $130 extra. Since there's no memory card slot, you may find 16GB limiting if you download even a few movies or large video games.

Comparisons and ConclusionsLet's dispatch the iPad mini 3$377.99 at Amazon first. It costs $100 more and all you get out of it is Touch ID. No, we don't understand it either. But the iPad mini 2 is by far Apple's best tablet value at the moment—all the iPad app goodness you want, at a price $100 lower than most iPads usually cost.

That makes the iPad mini competitive with small-scale Android tablets as well. And it puts me in the unusual position of recommending a more expensive Android tablet as our Editors' Choice, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4. I'm just so entranced by the Galaxy Tab's vibrant screen and expandability that I think it's worth the extra C-note.

At the $299 level, I can't think of anything else that quite matches this tablet right now. The mini 2's top Android-powered competitor is probably Nvidia's Shield Tablet, which has a powerful processor, but falls way behind the mini on game availability, screen quality and build quality. If you're interested primarily in productivity, take a close look at the Asus VivoTab Note 8£199.97 at Laptops Direct, which runs real Microsoft Windows, with all of its pro apps and all of its complexity and virus-susceptibility.

Our favorite Apple tablet is still the iPad Air 2$499.99 at Best Buy, which has the newer A8X processor for the best possible graphics and gaming experience. But if you find yourself with $300 in your pocket and you want to get in on the iOS app universe, the iPad mini 2 is a terrific buy.