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The first of these are the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, which work equally well. There are 3 of them, but you only start to get them by connecting your iPad to an iPhone or an Android device. The first two are the biggest, because you’re getting three times the speed of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, meaning you’ll be using up an entire gigabyte in battery life a day. The third is a low-voltage USB Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signal that allows you to use the iPad as a Bluetooth speaker by pushing the three signals through the tiny speaker port.

And finally, there are some standard, Apple-specific wireless connections that you don’t need at all — Bluetooth, the audio jack, and the accelerometer. I used these without complaint, and both the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections worked perfectly. If I didn’t have the extra Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, I can’t see myself using them for more than two or three hours at a time, but they work just fine.

Connections work just fine, and they look good too. If the red and white pins where the signal and power pins go on the iPad mini are familiar looking — like these are the iPad mini’s connectors — you’ll be fine, even if you’re used to using iOS devices in blue/white.

My iPad mini is a retina model, which means I’m getting the standard 2.5D Touch display. The edges are smooth and the text is readable, although I had to flip the screen horizontally to read the bottom of the interface, which is a strange oversight. There’s also a very slight amount of vertical scroll that happens on the edges of the screen. The UI is responsive and I thought I saw a few black squares, but that’s a sign that this particular iPad won’t go beyond the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth port.

So what do you do, really? Well, the iPhone has a ton of apps in its App Store and on most other devices, you can install and use them anywhere. If you’re only on the iPad Mini, you’ll find that the features are basically the same, even more so when you’re browsing, viewing links or checking out the app, even on the latest versions of iOS. That means you have only three places (there’s also the web browser, which uses both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) where you can install and