iPhone hitz: iPad mini: Unboxing Photos, First Impressions And Some Interesting Details

We’ve got our hands on the new iPad mini, which goes on sale in 34 countries today.

So here’s our unboxing experience of the black iPad mini in photos along with the first impressions and some interesting details.

First Impressions:

The iPad mini comes in a miniature version of the full-sized iPad box.
The iPad mini feels noticeably lighter than the iPad 3/iPad 4, which is not a big surprise as it weighs less than half the weight of the full-sized iPad. It will be our go-to gadget when we want to read in bed.
It’s also very thin, not as thin as the 5th generation iPod touch, but thinner than the iPhone 5.

You can comfortably hold it in one hand in portrait mode thanks to the slightly rounded sides, which can be quite useful in certain situations. Apple did the right thing by reducing the width of the side bezels.
The fit and finish of the iPad mini is incredible. The back casing comes with the same kind of anodized aluminum used in the 5th generation iPod touch (which we really liked) and MacBook line.
Actually, the iPad mini feels more like a bigger iPod touch rather than a smaller iPad due to the thinner bezel and anodized aluminum coating.
As some early iPad mini reviews have mentioned, the thin and light iPad mini with its anodized aluminum coating and slightly rounded sides makes it a pleasure to hold.
We noticed that the anodized aluminum coating is quite prone to fingerprints.
iPad mini’s stereo speakers sound pretty good.
If you’re used to the Retina Display, you will notice that the screen is of lower resolution, especially while reading.
The size of the text also seemed quite small while surfing, felt the need to double tap on webpages to zoom in to avoid straining our eyes.
The keys on the virtual keyboard are quite small in portrait mode, while they are quite nice and big in the landscape mode so it was more comfortable typing in landscape mode.
The screen size is perfect for apps like Tweetbot, Mail app, Reeder, which are some of our most used apps.
Unlike the full-sized iPad, it doesn’t feel odd using the iPad mini to take photos.

Some interesting details:
iPad mini comes with 92% charge out of the box.
While setting up the device, iOS refers to the iPad mini as the iPad and not with the “iPad mini” moniker.
The headphone jack is at the top edge.
The speaker grille is at the bottom rather than at the back.
iPad mini comes pre-installed with iOS 6.0 and not iOS 6.0.1. So users will have to update it iOS 6.0.1, which was released yesterday.
According to software requirements on the box, iPad mini requires iTunes 11 or above, so it looks like Apple delayed the launch of iTunes 11 at the last minute.
The Camera app doesn’t come with the Panorama mode.
According to the Geekbench 2 app, iPad mini is powered by a 999 Mhz dual-core ARMv7 processor with 512MB RAM.
iPad mini got a Geekbench score of 749, which is slightly lower than iPad 2′s average Geekbench score of 780, 3rd generation iPad’s average Geekbench score of 790 and significantly lower than 4th generation iPad’s early Geekbench score of 1757.
The Smart Cover seems to work much better with the iPad mini as it doesn’t tend to snap off like the bigger iPad, probably as it is much lighter.