Not exactly. Although the overall design is similar, a few significant differences make the iPad mini unique. The most obvious is the color scheme. Apple has adopted the iPhone 5s color options for the iPad mini: You can get one with a silver-aluminum back, a white screen bezel, and shiny silver buttons and switches. Or you can go with the black/slate model, which has a slate-black aluminum back, buttons, and switches with a glossy-black screen bezel. Like the iPhone 5, the iPad mini has edges between the body and the glass display.

Instead of tapering to a thin edge where it meets the screen, the back of the iPad mini is more squared-offlike that of the original iPhone and iPod touch. And on the longer sides, the bezels framing the iPad minis display are much narrower than those of a full-size iPad, allowing Apple to squeeze in as much screen area as possible in the iPad minis smaller package. One touch were looking forward to testing: that the iPad minis screen intelligently recognizes whether your thumb is simply resting on the display or whether youre intentionally interacting with it.

Though many people expected the iPad mini to be essentially a smaller version of the iPad 2, with much the same inner hardware, its actually the iPad 2 and the current full-size iPad. The iPad mini uses a dual-core A5 processor, like the iPad 2. (Because Apple doesnt publish clock speeds for its iPad chips, we cant compare them directly.) It has the same FaceTime HD (720p) front camera and 5-megapixel (1080p-capable) back camera as the fourth-generation iPad; compare that to the VGA-resolution front camera and 960-by-720-pixel back camera we got on the iPad 2. Similarly, the iPad mini offers Bluetooth 4.0, with optional LTE wireless data; the iPad 2 included Bluetooth 2.1, with only 3G connectivity as an option. (The iPad mini with LTE uses the same LTE chip as the fourth-generation iPad does, so its compatible with more carriers than the third-generation iPad was.) And like the fourth-generation iPad, the iPad mini sports a Lightning connector and includes Siri.