Buying Guide, Top mobile phones compared: what phone is best for you?
8. HTC One Mini
If you hold both the One and the One Mini, you’ll struggle to tell the difference, apart from the fact one is smaller than the other (obviously). The aluminium build quality pervades, and it’s hard to believe that you’re not holding one of the premium devices on the market.
Even the polycarbonate band that runs around the edge of the phone is unobtrusive, which means you get a distinctive design that doesn’t impact on the way the One Mini sits in the hand.
We love that the functionality of the One Mini isn’t compromised from its larger relative, with the likes of UltraPixels and BoomSound all involved without being watered down.
HTC has been very clever in the design of this phone by bringing nearly every great element of the One to the smaller version, and packaging it in a way that still makes it very attractive.
In short, it’s a cheaper version of the larger phone that scales down the processor and drops the price. Good combo, HTC.
Quick verdict
Would we recommend the HTC One Mini? Absolutely – the mid-range market renaissance is something we didn’t expect, but is an area that HTC is intent on winning – and we think it’s managed that with the One Mini.
We really love the aluminium shell, the UltraPixel camera and BoomSound on board, plus we get to play with the latest version of Android as well as all the cool apps like the Music Player, which show lyrics to songs as they’re playing. Actually, we’re just happy to have the headphone-boosting amplifier on board – as long as our songs are nicely audible, we don’t really care.
There’s a sub-class of phones around at the moment that try and replicate top-end features in the mid-range market, and while this isn’t the best phone in that class any more (we’ll serve that title to the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact) it’s still a cracking buy.
Page 5 of 13
Andre's Blog 