Yes to reading. 90% of my screen-time reading happens on my phone, and it's just feeling a bit cramped. I've tried to settle into a magazine sitting on the couch with my iPad Pro, and as an e-magazine experience News+ is nice... the big iPad just doesn't go anywhere very well. Little things, like getting up to get more coffee, sure I could set the iPad down, but I'd rather be able to putter around the house and read/watch. If you try to stand up with the 2016 iPad pro, from a couch-seated position, you have to do one of those back-forth rocks to get some momentum going. On ab day I put it on my chest while I do crunches... I'm just kidding. There's no ab day.
So, back to your point. I'm looking forward to taking more and better advantage of News+ content.
Same, same. I end up reading a lot, even if it's just social media posts (incl. this forum). I used to read books more often on my old mini, but it's so slow and I hate the lack of dark mode. Even if I can read in dark mode in kindle/books/safari, the overall light mode strains my eyes because I do the majority of my reading at night.
So when really motivated, I would have no choice but to read novels on my tiny phone screen and consequently I've stopped reading actual books. It's a little easier to read fanfiction on the phone because most of it is short, but it's still less than ideal. The mini will be a real boon for both regular novel reading + the occasional manga/comic, and highlighting/taking notes on technical books.
But I've heard people say that for reading actual full-size magazines, a bigger ipad is better, which makes sense to me though I'm not much of a magazine reader. I've gone into the apple store a few times to check out the bigger ipads and always found them... too big. If I wanted it, I could've gotten an air or refurbished 2020 ipad pro already, but I opted to wait for the refreshed mini.
Also, I didn't even get into the gaming aspect! I have phases of playing games on my iphone, and most of what I play works best in the iphone format eg. simple puzzle/idle games where being able to reach across the whole screen with one hand is important. I've felt discouraged from playing more graphically intensive games with complicated controls eg. PUBG, Genshin Impact, etc because there's too much going on and I can't see the action well enough on a small phone screen.
