We purchased the Apple iPad Mini 5 so that our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and review it. Read on for our full product review.
iPad mini 5 review: when portability matters most!
The iPad Mini (2019) is a highly portable Apple tablet with a small footprint and a thin body, perfect to take absolutely anywhere. An impressively long-lasting battery and the powerful A12 Bionic chip ensure it can keep up with gaming and AR, while a sharp display delivers bright graphics in beautiful colors. To help you see all the possibilities the Mini has to offer, we put one to the test for a few weeks in real-world work and play conditions and took it with us everywhere.
The iPad Mini is a tiny 8.0-by-5.3-inch (HW) tablet made of smooth, aerospace-grade aluminum and beautiful stain-resistant glass. It’s also sleek, at just 0.24 inches, just as thin as the iPad Air. It’s also incredibly light at 0.66 pounds, leaving you in no doubt that it was designed for portability. It’s still too big to use one-handed, the way people use phones, but as far as tablets go, it’s one of the smallest we’ve seen.
When it comes to ports and buttons, you have the standard trimmings. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, which means you can say goodbye to dongles. As late converts to AirPods, we think it’s a thoughtful addition. If you have the newer Apple EarPods with the Lightning connector, you can still use them, as the Mini retains the Lightning port rather than switching to USB-C. Some users might be disappointed with this, as the iPad Pro uses USB-C, like the new MacBooks, and the industry trend is clearly to phase out older ports.
