Whatever happened to the iPad mini?

Why the new iPod Touch is a better bet than a downsized iPad, plus the Digital Foundry take on the iPhone 5 reveal
In the wake of the launch of the ultra-cheap Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, many were wondering when Apple would be releasing its own mini-tablet to take on the new pretenders - the so-called iPad mini. The funny thing is that the Cupertino superpower did just that last week - but not many people appear to have actually noticed.
"The revival of the iPod Touch is Apple's response to the arrival of cheap 7-inch iPad competitors, with a price-point that seems to rule out the arrival any time soon for an iPad mini"

The fact of the matter is that Apple already has its own miniaturised iPad - the iPod Touch - and the timing and pricing of the new model announced last week strongly suggests that this could well be the entirety of the Cupertino superpower's response to the two-pronged Android offensive from Google and Amazon.
The make-up of the new device is intriguing - a mixture of core components from the iPhone 4S and the new iPhone 5, remixed into an enticing, if perhaps pricey package. Processor-wise, Apple falls back on its established A5 architecture, marrying dual core ARM Cortex A9s with a PowerVR SGX543MP2 - the firm suggesting that the new model is good for 40 hours of music playback, or eight hours of video on a single charge. This suggests that the 32nm version of the A5, as seen in the revised iPad 2, also gets an outing here.
The newly upgraded Retina display appears to be a match for the new screen found on the iPhone 5 - retaining the 640 pixel horizontal resolution found on the existing fourth gen iPod Touch, but enlarged vertically from 960 to 1136 pixels. Apple's pitch here is that the device is still small enough to be used in one hand, but the additional 18 per cent of resolution makes for easier consumption of web media, with the 16:9 aspect ratio a perfect fit for much of the latest video content from iTunes.
It can easily be argued that a sub-HD 4-inch display - no matter how densely packed with pixels, or how vivid the colours are - can match the real estate offered by the 7-inch 1280x800 displays found on the Nexus 7 or Fire HD, but Apple's response appears to be to turn this apparent weakness into a strength, by putting a strong emphasis on tech that's completely missing from its rivals in other areas.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-the-ipad-mini