The buzz on the recently rolled out iPhone 5 has yet to die down and now reports are out that another Apple gadget, the iPad Mini, will hit the market very soon, likely late October or early November.

Fortune Magazine reported on Monday that Apple plans to hold a media event on Oct 17 and since the tech world has been flooded with speculations that the tech giant will unleash the iPad Mini by Q4 2012, analysts said it's only logical to assume that the new toy will be unwrapped on that day.

If proved true, the smaller Apple tablet should be delivered on store shelves worldwide beginning Nov 2, Fortune predicted on its report, all the more setting the stage for a blockbuster holiday season that analysts said will attend Apple's closing quarter for the current year.

The time table makes sense, bloggers said, as they pointed to claims by Japanese blog site Macotakara that production of the iPad Mini has been underway for quite some time, yet for the new Apple product, Chinese hands were not assembling the device.

Citing an unidentified source, the Apple-centric news site insisted that "iPad Mini was started production in Brazilian factory," while admitting that no information was available to indicate that a parallel production activity was also ongoing in China.

While Apple has opted to remain mum on the matter, tech experts were convinced that a little sibling for the market dominant iPad will be released in the few weeks ahead, likely to sustain the momentum gained by the tech giant when it issued last month the iPhone 5, which quickly attracted more than five million buys the world over.

The iPad Mini is seen as Apple's answer to smaller tablets that have attracted considerable consumer attention and is rumoured to be deployed with a 7.85-inch screen, directly the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 that Amazon and Google had unboxed earlier this year.

Mashable said on Monday that Apple fans could very well expect a stripped down version of the bigger iPad in the new product, in which it will "run the Apple A5 chip (instead of the more powerful A6) chip and top out 32GB of storage."

The popular blog site echoed earlier reports that the iPad Mini will likely sell below $US200, which it stressed is foremost of Apple's consideration to successfully push out a product that is packed with less than sterling specifications.

While the regular iPad was designed to please the universal needs of consumers, its shrunk version is mostly geared for consumption, Mashable said, meaning the iPad Mini will be a home device without cellular connectivity and "be about reading books, browsing the Web, listening to music, watching movies."

Mashable is equally convinced that Apple will unveil the iPad Mini soon enough, adding the only thing that would prevent company CEO Tic Cook from going ahead with the plan is if he wanted to erase first the humiliation brought to Apple by the funky iOS map that came with the iPhone 5 release.

Mr Cook has admitted last week that the handset's new map application, which replaced the tried and tested Google Maps, was far from what consumers should be enjoying and pledged at the same time that efforts to improve the software is currently underway.