Hands-on at IFA: HTC One Mini

We got our hands on the HTC One Mini here are the HTC booth in IFA (no HTC One Max, unfortunatey). At 4.3 inches, the One Mini is a reduced version of the flagship handset, the HTC One and also making it a direct competitor of the Galaxy S4 Mini.

The HTC One Mini retained the unibody aluminum design of the One and just added a polycarbonate trimming with glossy ceramic finish like the one we saw in the One X.

The dual stereo front speakers are still there as well as the 4MP Ultrapixel camera. The handset feels really good on the hands and has that same premium effect like the HTC One.

The 4.3-inch display has a 720p resolution which makes the screen really clear, detailed and sharp.

The UI is the same Sense 5 UI with Blink feed, the navigation is also smooth and transitions are seemless. We fired several apps and they loaded pretty quickly. We weren’t able to run any synthetic benchmarks though to check how fast that dual-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon 400 processor is.

HTC One Mini specs:
4.3-inch Super LCD2 display @ 720×1280 pixels, 342ppi
1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon 400 CPU
Adreno 305
1GB RAM
16GB internal memory
WiFi
Bluetooth
4G LTE
4MP UltraPixel camera, LED flash, 1080p HD video
1.6MP front-facing camera, 720p HD video
Android 4.2.2 Jellybean with Sense UI
1,800mAh battery
132 x 63.2 x 9.3 mm (dimensions)
122 g (weight)

One of the things that might be of concern is the 1800mAh Li-Ion battery. It may not have enough juice to last the device for the entire day even with moderate to light use. We still have to figure that out once we get a review unit (so far, HTC Philippines still has the Butterfly S and the Desire 600 in their launch line-up).

Placing the One Mini with the HTC One, the hegith fo both handsets are almost the same but the width of the HTC One Mini is tighter but a significant measure. Over-all, we were impressed with the build quality and form factor of the HTC One Mini.

Here’s our specs comparison between the Galaxy S4 Mini vs. the HTC One Mini.