Sleek, powerful and lightweight; design; supports second-generation Apple Pencil

Display niggles; occasionally fiddly to use; poor for typing; carry a charger with you

During the iPad’s launch, Apple asked if there was space for a new category of device, squeezed between smartphones and laptops. For that category to exist, Apple said it would need to be better than the others at key tasks. Fast forward a decade and detractors still grumble about the iPad’s utility, but Apple’s sold over half a billion of the things.

Of Apple’s current range, the iPad mini most embodies the device’s original positioning. Its dimensions are roughly half a MacBook Air or two-and-a-half iPhone 13s. There’s no keyboard case – it’s not trying to be a laptop; but Apple Pencil support and an 8.3in display suggest more scope than a phone.

Even so, a nagging question remains: What is the point of this device? You already have a phone for ad-hoc tasks. You have a laptop for ‘proper work’. If you’re really into iPads, you likely already lovingly caress an iPad Pro, breathing in its screen acres.

By comparison to that device – or any other iPad – the iPad mini initially feels like a prank. It’s not weightless – and the design is solid – but the lack of heft is disarming. Only briefly, though, because it soon becomes freeing. And although the tablet’s not quite pocketable (unless you have comedy pockets), it’s more portable than any other Apple tablet.

Any suggestion the device is pointless vanishes once you start using it. Apple isn’t doing ‘compromise’. The A15 chip scythes through everything from high-end creative apps to console-style games. The revamped selfie camera supports Centre Stage, which combined with the iPad’s lack of weight makes it fantastic for video calls. The dual landscape speakers won’t make your stereo system sweat but still pack oomph for a device of this size.

The new design gives the iPad mini ‘blank canvas’/‘become anything’ appeal, rather than a chunk of the front face being taken up by a honking great Home button and massive bezels. The screen is bright, with excellent colour reproduction and is sharper than what you get with other iPads, which is handy since it’s used nearer to your face.

Yet it still somehow feels like an extravagance. Surely, your brain nags, you should buy a bigger iPad to do more with it? Using the iPad mini over a month, our question was whether one could be your only iPad – and whether that initial spark of joy fizzled once reality stomped in wearing size tens.

Some people will never get over the keyboard factor. If you’re the type of person who constantly makes an iPad pretend to be a laptop, the iPad mini isn’t for you. It’s defined by limitations: input devices and methods beyond tapping away at keys, and what you can do and achieve on a smaller display.