Apple iPad Mini 7 After Six Months

Back in April, I finally gave up on my Amazon 8" tablet and bought an iPad Mini 7. Shortly after that, my sister gifted me with an iPad Air 3rd Generation (2018). At the time, I posted about my first impressions, and this post is an update to that. Most of the comments here will be based on the iPad Mini; I'll get to the iPad Air at the end of this post. 

Yesterday, I published a post about my first impressions of iPad OS 26.

Hardware

I have three main complaints about the iPad Mini hardware. 

• The screen's maximum brightness isn't bright enough. It can be difficult to use outside beause of that. 
• The battery life is not great. It's better than my Pixel phone, but I expected more. It seems to be somewhat worse under iPad OS 26, even with the Liquid Glass interface toned down.
• It doesn't have FaceID. I can unlock my phone by looking at it; that would be a nice capability to have on the iPad. (I think I knew about this going in, but I didn't realize how much it would bother me). 

It's a well-made tablet with a very good screen, especially considering that it's not an OLED panel. I did think about buying a pencil for it, but it seems that Apple changed the way pencils work with the Mini 7 and I can't find one that is compatible with the Mini 7 and my iPad Air 3. 

Reading

My main purpose for buying the iPad Mini was to use it as an ereader, and for that, it works quite well. I use both the Amazon Kindle app and Google Play Books for reading ebooks. 

The Kindle app doesn't get bright enough on the Mini, forcing me to use the system control for brightness. OTOH, the Play Books app doesn't always retain its brighness setting. The Kindle app will sync page count between the iPad and my phone in both directions; the Play Books app will sycn from the tablet to the phone but not the other way around. Given the font size issues I've had with the Kindle app on my phone, I prefer using Play Books, so that is annoying. Both have their strong points but overall, I prefer Play Books.

I also use Libby, primarily for reading magazines from the library that aren't available on News+. (Discover and Astronomy, for example) or that don't support the text mode in News+. 

A suggestion to Apple: Add the ability to adjust the brightness on an app-specific basis. This would work the same way the Font Size control works. It would be handy for apps, like the Kindle app that have their own brightness control but don't get bright enough, or that rely on the system brightness setting. 

News+

I got a three-month trial of News+ with the Mini and it didn't take long for me to realize that I was going to have to pay for it when the trial expired. It's now become my main source for browsing for news articles and reading magazines. I do wish that more magazines had the "read articles in text mode" feature, though I have been able to use Libby for some that don't support it.  (Both Libby and PressReader have a text-mode feature that works on all magazines). Even if something is available from the library, News+ often has content from their websites, which is one of the handiest features. 

When reading magazines, I usually use the iPad Air for News+; it's easier to use on the larger 11" screen. 

iPad Air

I won't be upgrading the iPad Air to iPad OS 26. I've seen too many comments online about performance problems. It's running iPadOS 18 just fine and I don't want to risk messing it up. It is still getting updates to IOS 18 and given my limited usage, it will probably be fine even after updates to that stop. 

Going Forward

I will probably start looking at some of the native iPad OS apps and maybe a few casual games (a chess game would be nice to have). I should also try Safari; so far I've been using Chrome for the little web browsing I do on the tablets. And I need to take a closer look at the accessibility features; my eyes are not getting any better.