HTC One is undoubtedly the smartphone of the year with its premium aluminum design, powerful hardware and innovative ultrapixel camera. Moreover, this smartphone changed the fortune of HTC with good achieving good number of sales and ending its fledgling sales since several quarters against the market leader Samsung.
Now, the company is hoping to emulate its success at mid-range market with the release of its miniature variant. This way it’s also following the footsteps of Samsung which launched miniature version of its flagship Galaxy S4. It even carries the same moniker of Mini; let’s see what it offers-
HTC One Mini – Design
HTC One Mini borrows the same zero-gap construction through aluminum chassis giving it a classy and distinct look. It also has the same button layout as of HTC One with capacitive buttons at the bottom of the front screen. The front-camera and few sensors are available at the top of the screen.
The top of the smartphone has a standard headphone jack and a power button, while the bottom has microUSB port for charging. The right side has a volume rocker and left side house a micro-SIM slot. Just like HTC One, One Mini has a dual speakers in front featuring BoomSound technology. The back of the smartphone has a rear camera and HTC branding.
Display
The smartphone flaunts a 4.3 inch SLCD display with 720 p resolution (720 x 1280 pixels), equating to a decent pixel density of 342 pixel per inches. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass technology against scratches and external damages.
Hardware
HTC One runs on a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core processor accompanied by Adreno 305 GPU for processing graphics. For memory, it has 1 GB RAM and internal storage of 16 GB. Sadly, it doesn’t offer any option to upgrade the memory through external card. In terms of connectivity, it has support for 2G/ 3G/ 4G networks, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, DLNA and GPS.
It’s fuelled by a non-removable Li-Po battery of 1800 mAh which gives it a standby time up to 692 hours and talk-time up to 13 hours.
Software
The device is loaded with latest version of Android 4.2.1 (JellyBean) with HTC’s proprietary Sense 5 interface. Amongst many things, the highlight of this UI is BlinkFeed feature which first came in HTC One. BlinkFeed is a beautiful magazine like widget on the home screen showing latest news and updates from social networks at one place.
Camera
HTC One Mini sports a 4 MP ultrapixel camera which was also seen on HTC One. The ultrapixel camera contains more number of pixels and thus offers superb performance in low light conditions. It also has autofocus, LED flash and features such as geotagging, HDR, face and smile detection, etc. It’s also capable of shooting Full HD videos at 30 fps.
For video calling purposes, the smartphone offers a secondary camera of 1.6 MP.
Conclusion
The smartphone obviously brings the best of HTC One in a smaller version HTC One Mini and affordable pricing. It’s biggest competition would be with Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini which score more due to 1.5 GB RAM, support for external memory but looses out on design and screen resolution.