After numerous leaks and rumours it’s finally official, the HTC One is getting a slightly smaller sibling in the way of the HTC One Mini.
Recently there’s been a lot of devices which seemingly claim to be ‘mini’, whilst not actually living up to that name — well it’s okay because HTC has decided to also confuse you since the One Mini is quite literally only 5mm smaller in terms of width and length, and only a measly 0.5mm thinner!
It also features screen 0.4 inches smaller, which I guess is a significant change if you’re used to larger screens, but it’s still bigger than other normal sized phones, such as the iPhone 5. That 4.3-inch display is still HD, although we’ve gotten a slight downgrade from 1080p to 720p, so as expected the pixel density has taken a tumble as well, with just 341ppi compared to the One’s 469.
When it comes down to it, the HTC One Mini isn’t all that different from its older sibling, you have the exact same software, the same design and even an identical camera sensor (although Optical Image Stabilisation has been taken out).
The insides have been slightly tweaked in order to get this to a price point which HTC says will be “two tiers lower” than the HTC One. Gone is the 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor and in its place is a slightly less impressive 1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon 400. You’re also losing a whole 1GB of RAM as that also has been downgraded to just a single GB. Storage has also taken a bit of a hit, with the size available halved from 32GB to 16GB.
Design wise there isn’t much to tell them apart, they both share the same design on the back of the device, right down to the exact same metal being used. There was one ever so slight annoyance with the HTC One Mini when compared to the One though, and that was the side of the device.
Gone is the premium look and feel of the metallic buttons with a nice understated plastic for the sides and in its place we have a really cheap look and feel — something we expect on a Samsung device not a HTC.
We’re impressed that HTC still managed to include its “ultrapixel” camera, which worked great on the HTC One, and in our brief playtime with the device still looked as great as ever.
The HTC One Mini’s availability is currently unknown, but with 4G LTE support as standard, you can almost guarantee that we’ll see this on EE — after all they do carry the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, which is less comparable to its namesake than the One Mini. We’ve reached out to other carriers and will update the post when we know more.
Price is also down to the carriers, with HTC saying that it is aiming for a price point two tiers lower than the HTC One.
Update:
We have since learned that EE will be offering the HTC One Mini, though prices have yet to be confirmed.
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