Reported by The Guardian
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All-round upgrades fit a bigger OLED screen in a smaller and lighter body with water resistance for first time
T he new iPad mini takes Apple’s fan-favourite tiny tablet and upgrades just about everything about it, including giving it a new OLED screen, serious performance, speakers embedded into the display and even water resistance, all with a big new price tag.
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The eighth-generation iPad mini costs from £699 (€749/$699/A$1,099), which is £200 or equivalent more than the original price of its predecessor as RAMageddon continues to bite . That makes it uncomfortably expensive, costing £270 more than the base model iPad (A16) and only £50 cheaper than the bigger 11in iPad Air M4 .
The new mini reads like a wishlist from small iPad owners. The tablet is about 1mm thinner, 38g lighter and slightly smaller compared with its predecessor , but still manages to fit in a 0.2in larger screen. The mini is the first iPad to have IP67 water resistance, which means trips to the beach or pool are less fraught with danger. Even the video call camera has been moved to a more sensible position in the landscape edge of the tablet. It lacks Face ID, though, making it reliant on the Touch ID fingerprint scanner in the power button.
The new 8.5in OLED screen is the star of the show: bright, vibrant and with inky blacks to make the absolute most of your content. But it lacks the “ProMotion” display technology Apple uses on many of its other devices to keep scrolling and interactions super smooth. It is particularly jarring when you move from a modern iPhone with its 120Hz screen back to the iPad with its relatively slow 60Hz display.
The new speaker system has a pair of tweeters that fire out of slimline gaps between the screen glass and aluminium body with woofers that play directly through the screen. They sound really very good for something this slim, with direct, powerful audio you can’t block…