Prior to using iPad I was working entirely on a bulky laptop and this caused certain inertia. For menial tasks and activities like watching videos, typing emails, reading and similar tasks, it felt too tedious to open the laptop and I started to procrastinate.
Hence, I decided to get something portable but not small like a big iPhone which sacrifices utility to fit in the mobile form factor. But again the iPad was too big and heavy to be qualified as a handy device. In my previous experience I had the iPad Air first generation spend most of its life inside a drawer.
And that’s how I got to the iPad mini. The iPad would never qualify to replace my laptop, at least till the point iOS can handle multiple excel windows simultaneously. Moreover, the full size iPad is not only a little too heavy to be held in hands for long but also the screen real estate is too big for hand held use.
Anyway, enough with the reasoning for purchase, you can read more about it here on my blog regarding the first impressions of iPad Mini 5
My use case included: typing emails, updating Project Management portal, responding to queries on my Udemy courses, taking hand written notes (with the Apple Pencil), watching YouTube, reading on Kindle and New York Times and referring to educational content. And one more thing that I also accomplished with the iPad Mini was live tutoring over Google Classroom.
And in all of the above use cases, the iPad Mini performed excellently. Although one thing that I would like to mention. If you are a student and want to watch video in one window and take notes in another, the screen real estate on the mini is too small to accomplish the task.
Moreover, if note taking is your primary use case, the mini is far less optimised as the small screen size distorts the display to print size ratio. What it means is that the same resolution of canvas fits on 7.9” display as on 10.9” display so what you jolt down is comparatively bigger in proportion to the canvas. You won’t realise this until you print your notes or try to markup PDF documents.
Other things that you might want to know.
The battery life is amazing, on days of nominal use like 3/5 hours of screen time across applications, it easily lasts two days. While heavy usage days including 8/10 hours of screen time will leave you with 10/15% to spare. And the laminated True Tone display elevates the user experience. Since I am still on an iPhone 7, I can truly appreciate the technological advances on this display.
Some complains that I have include the Wifi drops when it is linked to the iPhone. It makes me feel that the frustration is subtly designed to persuade you for the LTE Model on your next iPad purchase. Another issue is the files app, which seems to have bugs or performance issues. Copying and moving large folders across cloud storage and uploading large files on certain websites, don’t seem to work properly.
Apart from the complains, the overall experience is amazing and I will continue to use this extinct species for a while. And if it gets smaller bezels and some phone functions, I might just dump my iPhone.
PS: 64 Gigs is sufficient if you have cheap hi-speed internet and do not need to store media content. And if you are considering longevity, 256 maybe a safer bet – but the price was a bit too steep for me.
And if you want to know about the logic and basics that you need to consider while purchasing a laptop, you can access our comprehensive guide here.
Header Image Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 