The iPad Mini hasn’t appealed much to me till now, but seeing the die cast mold of the device in the pictures below, which may just be the final design made the slate more appealing suddenly. There was a time when Steve Jobs said that 7 inch tablets were dead on arrival, but the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire proved him wrong. Now Apple is preparing one, if the recent rumors are real, of course…
Apple is expected to unveil the 7.85 inch iPad Mini sometime in October and previous leaks showed that the device may come with a thinner bezel. The pics you see here come from Giga.de, who snapped photos of the iPad Mini die cast mold at IFA 2012. This is a reference design, the kind you show to accessory makers and as you can see it includes that new proprietary port that’s found on the iPhone 5. There’s also a pair of big speakers and the whole device is just a bit thinner than the iPhone 4S.
Basically it resembles a bigger iPod Touch and there are cutouts for a front facing FaceTime camera, smaller dock connector and big speaker grilles. The main curiosity I have about the device is its CPU choice and resolution. I expect something like 1280 x 800 (or bigger) for the resolution and the Apple A5X as CPU. What are your expectations for this model?
