HTC says the Mini is an attempt to take the One range to as wide an audience as possible. Yet curiously it’s not massively cheaper, nor is it considerably smaller. It’s a tall handset, thanks to the presence of the impressive BoomSound speakers at either end, and with the same aluminium unibody chassis as the One – and the same build quality – it is a solid, weighty device.
The device has been shrunk to fit around a 4.3-inch display (720p and over 300ppi pixel density), and it does feel particularly good in the hand. It’s easy to manoeuvre around the screen, and easier to reach up to the power button still located on the top-left edge of the phone.
As is always the case with ‘Mini’ variants, the specs have been reduced in several areas. Compared to the One the processor is now dual-core rather than quad-core (Snapdragon 400), RAM – somewhat disappointingly – is 1GB rather than 2GB (with around 770MB available), storage capacity has dropped to 16GB (the unit we were handling had less than 10GB available, although we can’t be sure it will be as low from a factory reset), and the battery capacity has also fallen. On top of that HTC couldn’t fi nd room to squeeze in either NFC or the infrared port from the One. You do get the full Sense experience, including an upgraded Zoe that has more themes and now enables you to add your own music tracks, and Android 4.2.2 is on board. The camera is the same ‘Ultra-pixel’ four-megapixel sensor from the One.
On the whole our first impressions of the One Mini are very positive. The One was one of the most impressive phones we’ve ever seen, and although the Mini doesn’t have quite the same wow factor, it appears to share all of that device’s strengths. The spec reductions didn’t appear to have any signifi cant impact on performance, either, as the device ran smoothly in our tests.
A shortage of storage is likely to be the biggest concern, and we’ll have to wait and see whether a lack of RAM hinders the prospects of future OS updates, a pertinent concern given HTC’s recent announcement that it wouldn’t be updating the One S any further, little more than a year after it went on sale.
