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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I think the 1024x768 screen resolution is probably a smart move: same as my old iPad 2, but smaller. Not retina display quality, but not adding a retina display allowed the iPad mini to be less than half the weight.

That said, my Samsung Galaxy S III has 1280x720 resolution which makes it really nice for watching Netflix, TED videos, etc. And the Galaxy phone is very light weight.

I have decided to not buy anymore Apple gear, but if not for that, if I was in the market for an iPad, I would rather have this smaller one that is less than half the weight.

I see the mini competing more with 'super phones' like the Samsung Galaxy S III.

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If you were in the market for a small tablet, why would you not get a Nexus 7?

Because the tablet iOS ecosystem is far, far, far better than Androids.

There are plenty of great iPad specific apps.

I've heard this a lot, but I honestly can't think of anything I use on my iPad that isn't built-in. I say more or less the same thing about my Nexus 7, aside from stuff like game emulators which are verboten on iOS (and, truthfully, I don't use them that often).

Care to share?

The main reason I bought an iPad was... the musical apps (and the fact you can read ebooks with the Kindle app). The iPad is a revolution in the musical scene.

Musical apps is something you won't get in the Android Eco-system basically because the OS itself sucks at it(although 4.1 seems to have improved a bit on that side).

With this in mind(musical apps), I will always favor the iPad (mini) over an Android tablet.

That's interesting. I found them largely useless, Lemur and TouchOSC aside (Android has TouchOSC support, though I do keep the iPad around if I want to use Lemur--haven't for a while though), but it's cool to see that they're useful for somebody.

I like Auria, Amplitube,BeatMaker2,iMS20,iSequence,DM1,Animoog,Soundprism and the likes very much. with audiobus on its way, it is going to get even more interesting.

Been using them for lives & recording demos (iPad+MiC+Jam). the iPad never crashes(not like Android that freezes a lot).

Obviously you do no get a full pc stack and the quality is still not there so I resort to the Mac for more functionality/sound treatment but you can enjoy quite very much if you can't afford the thousands that cost Native Instruments softs or real hardware synths/drum machines.

Music apps and children's apps are two big areas where Android is lagging far behind iOS.

Strongly disagree, iOS is horribly limiting. I like having OSMAnd navigation with frequently updated offline vector maps and I like having access to hardware capabilities for stuff like this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1914699

Also (IMO) latest versions of Android wipe the floor with iOS when it comes to user experience and options. And N7 is quad core with Tegra, superb build quality and larger resolution for less money.

> not adding a retina display allowed the iPad mini to be less than half the weight

do the pixels weigh more? Seriously, would faster graphics weigh more? Or are you saying juicing the graphics would eat more battery, and therefore, it would weight more?

Yes. The iPad 3 was significantly thicker and heavier than the iPad 2. It takes a larger battery to drive 4 times the pixels and maintain a 10 hour battery life.

It is 0.6mm thicker and 50g heavier. That's a 6% and 7% increase, respectively. I wouldn't really call it 'significant'.

The retina display is significantly less translucent, requiring a greater backlight for the same brightness on the front of the panel than a non-retina.

The backlight being the lion's share of the battery consumption, this requires a significantly larger battery.

Just wait a year and there will probably be a new iPad mini with a retina screen and updated processor.

(iPad 3 was launched with the retina screen a year after the iPad 2. And 2 years after the iPad 1)

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