Apple has more products on the market today than ever before. Specially the iOS range. Just to recap, there is the iPod touch 5th gen, iPhone 5, Apple iPad 2, iPad 4th gen, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and the iPad mini that launched today. That’s a lot of products, also do consider that each one of them have variants based on WiFi / 3G / 4G & storage (except the iPhone 4 which is in just 8GB flavor as of today). So how does a consumer go about making a choice between each of these iOS devices? Isn’t this a crowd?
My focus is specially on the iPad mini that launched today. Isn’t that a competition to the smaller iOS devices? An iPod touch or the iPhone 5? At $329, the iPad mini is cheaper, gives iOS experience, is portable & supports all 700k apps on the App Store. Not just that, it also has a good camera, decent enough Dual-Core processor, Siri support and LTE connectivity.
In short, the iPad mini is loaded. It sure competes with the iPod touch and the iPhone 5. Perhaps it does splits the iPad buyers between a 9.7″ screen and a 7.9″ screen, but that is perhaps substituted with a whole lot of new buyers jumping in to buy the iPad just because of a smaller screen.
Personally, I would today consider the iPad mini my iPod touch. If I wanted an iPod for music only, I might have taken a nano, but I love the iPod touch for the apps, web and email. The iPad mini does all of it for me, be it music, videos, web, apps and email. All of those either as good or better than the iPod touch. Similarly, if I have an iPad mini, why would I want a iPhone 5? Apple is in the same situation as it was with the iPhone vs iPod touch. Apple would prefer to cannibalize its own product lines instead of competitors doing it. Guess that works for them, but the research a consumer needs to do before getting an iOS device is now huge.
So why do you want to buy an iOS device? Let us try to figure what fits your pocket!