Close Up Photos Of the New Mini Dock Connector
In the first picture below, you’ll see two 8-pin dock connector and headphone jack assemblies for the Mini iPad on the left.
Another thing of note is the fact that the iPad Mini’s headphone jack is pretty close to the dock.
From the images, the new connector appears symmetrical — a nice innovation aside from simply miniaturisation. I’m not an expert in connector design, but it also seems like the ‘pins’ are much less likely of getting damaged in this iteration; you can’t bend them as easily.