The iPad mini is a Book; the iPad Air is a Magazine

I wrote about my first impressions of the iPad Air yesterday, and posted that article about two hours after I got the Air. Later, I posted an update, saying:

“Aside from the use of the iPad as a content creation device, which is not my use case, it seems to me that the full-sized iPad is a magazine and the iPad mini a book. You may disagree, but the size of the iPad Air, to me, makes reading magazines much easier. I can still read books comfortably — and surf the web, answer email, scan Twitter — but I find the iPad mini a bit small for non-responsive layout magazines, such as The New Yorker.”

This, to me, is the biggest difference between the two devices. Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, corroborated my thoughts, saying:

“In my past year as an iPad mini user, there were two kinds of reading that I basically stopped doing on my tablet: digital editions of print magazines and comic books. These are both formats that just work better with a larger screen, because everything is larger. The iPad Air’s screen is simply closer to the intended page size of those periodicals than that of the iPad mini.”

And that, to me, is the key difference between the two devices. Notwithstanding any type of content creation, or the mere desire to have a bigger display for reading web pages or playing games, the iPad Air, for me, is ideal for reading magazines; the iPad mini still shines as a book-reading device. Naturally, I use my iPad for more than just that, but, like Jason, I had stopped reading magazines on the iPad mini, because they were too small.

Looks like it’s time to catch up with those back issues of The New Yorker…