With competition in the mini-tablet arena heating up by the day, the impressive specifications of the Apple iPad Mini and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD make these two devices the key competitors in the 7in-tablet form factor.

The iPad Mini, with its 7.9-inch screen, has comparatively more screen real estate vis-a-vis the Kindle Fire HD which, featuring a 7-inch screen, falls stiffly in line with the 7-inch tablet category. While the iPad Mini boasts Apple' characteristic minimalist design, weighing only 308g and measuring just 7.2mm in depth; the 395g Kindle Fire HD has a girth of 10.3mm.

So far as the software of these two min-tablets is concerned the iPad Mini runs the latest version of Apple's mobile platform, the iOS 6 version; whereas the Kindle Fire runs a hugely modified version of Android OS 4.0 `Ice Cream Sandwich.' Both the devices have a 4,440 mAh battery, which lasts 10 hours on iPad Mini and 11 hours on Kindle Fire HD.

The iPad Mini features a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU with an estimated 1.5GHz clock speed, along with a PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU. The Kindle Fire HD, boasting a TI OMAP 4460 SoC under the hood, is also equipped with a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, with 1.2GHz clock speed.

The iPad Mini is available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB storage options, with the base model priced at £269; while the Kindle Fire HD comes in only two models - 16GB and 32GB - with the entry-level version costing just £159.