Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller showed off both devices on Tuesday. "You can hold it in one hand," Schiller said of the iPad mini, as he highlighted its aluminum and glass enclosure. "It's incredibly thin...and beautiful from every angle."

The iPad mini is 7.2mm thick--23 percent thinner than the new, fourth-generation iPad--"thin as a pencil," as Schiller put it. It weighs 0.68 pounds, which is half the weight of the previous iPad. "It's as light as a pad of paper."

The iPad mini is available in white with silver or black with slate black, much like the iPhone 5.

In determining what size to make the iPad mini's screen, Schiller said, Apple engineers worked to make the device smaller, but not "so small that it stops being incredibly useful." The iPad mini screen measures 7.9 inches diagonally. Like the iPad 2, the iPad mini employs a 1024-by-768 resolution, meaning all existing iPad apps work with the iPad mini, too.

Schiller said that the iPad mini is great for the same tasks that the full-size iPad is good for: games, Facebook, Web browsing, email, GarageBand, iWork, and so on. "I could sit here and list 275,000 examples" of what the iPad mini is good for, Schiller said, referring to the number of iPad-optimized apps in the App Store.