The rumors were mostly right.  At Apple’s Special Event today in San Jose, CA, the iPad mini was revealed.  Its screen measures  7.85 inches diagonally, slightly bigger than its 7-inch rivals that have crafted their own market niche with “phablets.”  As the holiday shopping season approaches, the iPad mini will round out Apple’s iDevice line up and offer an alternative to Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire, but its price tag of $349 is nowhere near the competitive price point Apple will need to attract the broad consumer base it could’ve lured in with something under $250.  The battle of the minis will boil down to the major players’ ecosystem, and Apple had some news today regarding its expansion in this area as well.

See here for an early comparison of the iPad mini to its market rivals, and check back for an updated comparison post.

The iPad mini is 7.2 millimeters thick and weighs 0.68 pounds, some 53 percent lighter than the iPad. And like its big brother, the mini will ship in black and white.  And as with the iPhone 5 event earlier this year, Apple’s clearly lost the keys to its gate of secrecy, as the countless leaks leading up to today have been confirmed with the iPad’s launch and many of its specs.

One iSurprise we did get at today’s event is the fourth-gen iPad tablet, with a new A6X processor that has double the graphics and CPU performance, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. The newest iPad retains the same retina display as on the third-gen model, as well as the 10-hour battery.  However the fourth-gen tablet does have twice the 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi speed, and expands LTE coverage to new carriers, including Sprint.

Boosting the Apple Ecosystem

Apple also announced a new version of iBooks Author, the software that lets users create textbooks, that allows publishers to use their own fonts, along with “multitouch widgets” in the books.  The update to iBooks fits well with today’s event, given its success is directly attributed to the iPad’s appeal in the education sector.

Cook says that 80 percent of the US high school curriculum is now available in Apple’s iBookstore.  That’s a significant boost for Apple, considering their device price points and growing competition for mobility and cloud tools in education, the enterprise and the public sector.  Both Microsoft and Google are expected to reveal some interesting device/service combos next week in hopes of curbing Apple’s complete takeover of the enterprise and other markets.