After Apple's iPad Mini debut, I got to get hands-on with the newest Apple tablet -- or maybe I should say "hand-on" since this thing is so easy to hold in one hand. You'll want to spin it around on your finger like a Harlem Globetrotter. But you probably shouldn't -- even though it's only as heavy as a legal pad of paper, it's significantly more fragile. 

This thing is thin, you guys. It's as thin as a pencil, 0.28 inch thin, 7.2mm thin. That's ever so slightly thinner than the iPhone 5, at 7.6mm. It's got the same coloring as the iPhone 5, too. The black one has a charcoal aluminum unibody, and the white version has a matte silver back. And on each iPad mini, the chamfer where the aluminum meets the glass is super-shiny, polished by diamonds, feeling luxe under your thumb.

Speaking of your thumbs, the bezel area on the left and right of the iPad mini's screen are visibly slimmer than on the larger iPads, but it's still easy to hold -- the lighter weight and 5.3-inch device width encourage gripping it by the edges anyway. My thumbs never interfered with what I was doing.

What was I doing? Trying to get used to the smaller onscreen buttons. They aren't any smaller than on an iPhone or iPod touch, but they feel smaller because they're sitting on a larger screen than those other two devices they have are. The iPad mini is too wide for one-handed thumb typing, but two-handed thumb typing worked well -- the trick is to just type without stopping, knowing you're going to hit the wrong keys sometimes, let autocorrect catch what it catches, and pause at the end of each paragraph to fix what it missed. Holding the iPad mini in my right hand while trying to tap targets with my left pointer felt downright awkward. It'll take some adjusting to reach my top typing speed once again. 

Personal aside: During the event, when they announced the iPad mini's $329 starting price, my first thought was, I can get one for my parents for Christmas. They don't own any Apple products at all, but I think they'd appreciate the experience of using FaceTime to chat with my son anywhere in their house over using Skype and a cheap webcam on their ancient desktop PC. Then when I tried typing an email on the iPad mini, I almost immediately decided against it as I pecked at the smaller keyboard. I'll pay the extra $70 for an iPad 2, or even try to pick up a used or refurbished iPad 3 instead, just because they are touchscreen newbies. (Mom, if you're reading this, act surprised, OK?) iPad vets will probably get used to having smaller touch-targets in a few days. 

The screen, even though it's not "true Retina" looks great. At 1024x768 (the same resolution as iPad 2) over the 7.9-inch diagonal screen, that works out to 163 pixels per inch, the same density as an iPhone 3GS. Text looked pretty sharp -- the same as the iPhone 3GS -- and images were brightly colored with respectably deep levels of black. 

I didn't get to test Wi-Fi speeds (the iPad mini has the same dual-band 802.11n as the big iPad and iPhone 5), and the unit I demoed didn't have LTE. The dual-core A5 chip might be the same as in the iPad 2 (we'll have to wait for a teardown to be sure), but it probably has more RAM, since the iPad mini supports Siri, and the iPad 2 (512MB of RAM) doesn't. 

Naturally, the iPad mini, as well as the new iPad 4, has the new Lightning connector. For something that just came out a month ago, Lightning seems right at home here -- could you imagine such a slim, svelte iPad mini with a big honkin' serial-port like 30-pin dock on the bottom?

Aside from the smaller onscreen buttons, which shouldn't thwart many users for long, the iPad mini is an awesome little tablet. Its size and weight let it compete with smaller e-readers, while its power and access to the full ecosystem of iPad apps make it a capable, extremely portable tablet, too. We can't wait to get our hands on one and really put it through its paces. Preorders start tomorrow. Are you getting one?