Hands on with the perfectly-sized iPad mini

A quick recap for those who have been in a cave for the past eight hours.

The iPad mini is basically a smaller iPad 2 with some important features added.

While it does not have the retina resolution display of the iPad 3, it does share the same resolution as the original and iPad 2 - 1024x768 - ensuring that almost all of the 275,000 iPad apps currently available will work fine with it.

The iPad mini, like the fourth generation iPad also gets the Lightning port, better LTE and wifi performance.

Prices start at $329 for a 16GB wifi version and go up to $649 for 64GB LTE version. You can pre-order starting from Friday 26 October.

So what you cry? What's it actually like?

And that's where I can help. Immediately after the Apple event today I had a chance to go hands on with the iPad mini.

It reminded me of the first time I held an iPhone 5.

It seemed so much lighter than the previous generation, I was momentarily confused. It's amazingly thin, and easy to hold with one hand or even in two fingers.

Personally, I think I'll find the iPad mini the device I take with me everywhere - at least when I want to do more than I can on my iPhone, but less than when I need a laptop.

It will also be great for gaming. Where you may grow a bit tired of holding the iPad for long gaming sessions, the iPad mini will be much easier to handle.

I had a bit of time to try out some iOS standards that were pre-installed on the iPad mini by Apple.

Casual games like Cut the Rope worked perfectly. More graphically-intense games such as Real Racing 2 and Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy also worked well but showed the occasional stutters.

Basing the iPad mini on the iPad 2 internals is undoubtedly to credit for these games working fairly well on the new device, though it appears they may need to be tuned based the exact internals.

Still, if I had one thing bad to say about the iPad mini, it would be the home button. It felt oddly small - even smaller than the home button on the iPhone.

The wider question, however, is why does iPad mini matter so much?

It's an important release for Apple for many reasons. For one, it matters due to choice. As a product matures, the need for new sizes - and price points - grows. As with other Apple product lines, we now have a large and a small version.

Size also matters for people with small hands. Take for instance educational users. Kids will find the iPad mini easier to hold, use, and carry. As the iPad is becoming more and more important to education in the US, this matters.

Portability is another consideration. While the iPad is easy to carry around, it still needs a bag of some sort to keep it from being dropped. The iPad mini, while by no means pocketable, will fit better in jackets, purses, and other places where the iPad was just too large.

Apple hasn't gone super cheap. It's lowered the barrier so while $329 isn't cheap, it's less than $399, which used to be the cheapest iPad you could get. It's not Kindle Fire territory ($199), but then again, Apple never paddles in the shallow end of the pool.

So I'm happy to see the iPad mini finally revealed. I'll be ordering mine on Friday. What about you?