the fractal designed toine R4 case gets featured on the wow build logs of the
week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it welcome
to an unboxing that I am super stoked on
or at least I was until I broke open the
seal on it and actually played around with it a fair bit before I got started
this is the HTC1 mini and this particular one is an AT&T version from
the US so if you're here in Canada then I have no idea how you'd get one comes
with a little bit of documentation wow that's in there really
good comes with a phone that you have to like actually legit pull on the tab in
order to remove comes with HTC's Sim changing tool which is holy crap it's
like they don't want you to take this thing apart comes with a wall wart some
HTC stickers and a micro USB cable
really wish micro USB would go away or at least be replaced by something better
but that is fine so so yeah the HTC One
Mini let's go ahead and turn this baby on and go through what is interesting
and not interesting about it so let's start with the hardware spec I was
probably being unrealistic but when I first heard about the One Mini I was
really expecting this but smaller and that really isn't what happen so of
course it's a smaller screen this I understand it's a 4.3 versus a 4.7in
display and in terms of real size that
makes more of a difference than you'd think 4 in does so there's our size
comparison against the full-sized HTC1
it also downgrades to a 720p screen which I don't mind yet again because the
display density is still very good because it's smaller so you don't see
any of the individual pixels but what I really didn't like was the downgrade to
a super LCD 2 display um this gives it
still great viewing angles but somewhat yellowish whites um somewhat less deep
blacks as well as a noticeable difference in color depth which is
mostly noticeable when you're looking at things like a list of emails where
they're colorcoded you know off white for un red and then white for red and
it's a little bit harder to tell the difference and it's not a huge deal you
can tell the difference unlike older TN LCDs on computers but it just is a
little bit more fatiguing it still has the two front-facing boom sound speakers
although they really don't go as loud as the ones built into the original one and
it still has the UltraPixel camera if I was going to say there's something that
I really do like about this phone it's the fact that it still has that 4
megapixel camera with large pixels and
the f2.0 aperture meaning you get great low light performance but it lacks the
optical image stabilization of the HTC1 CPU wise the One Mini uses an S400 1.4
GHz dual core versus the 1.7 GHz quad
core S600 in the HTC1 and this brings with it a couple of other disadvantages
as well so it uses an adreno 305 GPU which is is much less powerful but n
less of a big deal than you might think because a 720p display has fewer than
half as many pixels as a 1080p display so if you're gaming you you don't
actually need the horsepower to nearly the same extent but it also means that
it uses a different so that doesn't include Wireless AC support which is
pretty awesome with the HTC1 it's just faster Wi-Fi if you happen to have an AC
router so it only goes up to Wireless N it uses sense 5 it runs Android 4.2.2
and it has an 1800 Milah battery which combined with the lower power requirements gives it similar battery
life to the one which I usually get through a day so there's one out of
maybe 20 days that I don't make it all the way to the end of the day with the one and that's usually when I'm using it
pretty heavily software wise let's talk about zo so the camera is I really like
the camera um zo are something that I don't use a whole lot so it's this
little button over here and it allows you to take short little whoops sorry it
allows you to take short little video clips that basically are supposed to
capture a snippet of life to me I feel like if I wanted to do that in much the
same way that if I wanted to upload a short video to vine I would just upload a short video to YouTube if I wanted to
do that I would just record a short video and then I would use their excellent highlight reels feature in
order to re in order to review it and highlight reels has actually gotten
better already so it takes your pictures and videos from a given event or
location and then puts them into a nice little 30- second thing that has some
like panning effects and zooming effects and stuff like that it puts it to music
and starting with the HTC1 mini you no longer are stuck with the music that
comes on the phone you can actually pick your own music and have your highlight reel go along to that now let's get into
blink feed which is supposed to be a big selling point of sense I personally
don't use it at all I'm more of a
content creator as opposed to a Content consumer so if I had a lot of people
that I followed I'm much more likely to use blink feed but I tend to go straight
to the sources for things that I'm interested in knowing about so maybe I'm
a bit oldfashioned that way but I don't use blink feed at all on hand usage this
is where we're getting into things that I start to really like about the phone
it's really really nice when doing something as simple as typing a text
message to actually be able to reach that Q button I don't need it often but
when I do need the Q button I really need to press it with that said it's not
perfect the plastic band around the outside of the phone is very glossy and
actually quite slippery to the point where I honestly had a little bit of
trouble holding on to it even though it is much smaller why don't we take this
as an opportunity to talk about something else I really liked which is the industrial design of the phone it's
much much more beautiful than something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 which borrows
a lot of the plastic elements from the full-sized S4 it's got that beautifully
finished aluminum on the back it's got the aluminum front pieces here where the
speaker grills however the speaker girls are not manufactured with the same level
of precision as the HTC1 you can see the spacing is actually less dense I do know
that this was a challenge to get those micro holes drilled that closely
together and one thing that did sort of irk me a little bit was there's a lift
on the plastic here so you can actually hear that so it's not quite completely
flush along the front of the phone other than that it's pretty straightforward there's your micro USB on the bottom and
your volume rocker switches on the side yet another thing I really liked vastly
improved the volume switches on the HTC1 are really hard to feel when you're
touching them and which one you're touching and you know how uncomfortable they feel about you touching them uh on
the top you've got your headphone microphone combo Jack as well as your lock switch which I also feel as an
improvement over the flush mounted one on the HTC1 your micro SIM slot on the
side and other than that um yeah front-facing camera light sensor back
facing camera all these all these good things Beats Audio is still completely
unnecessary you should just pick up an audio player with an EQ such as power
ramp and you can go ahead and set that up and it does come with 25 gigabytes of
Dropbox so let's get into the more of the reviewy stuff the things I liked and
didn't like let's talk about the screen 720p is a great resolution for a screen
this size however the super LCD 2 screen
here just is plain not as good as the one on the HTC1 I didn't find it
bothered me just looking at it but when I compare them side by side and I go oh
man the one's really not that much more expensive um it's hard to justify going
with this the camera really liked it all it lacks is Optical image stabilization
and I have pretty steady hands and often I find Optical image stabilization
particularly when it's not really well implemented like on our xa20 $2,000
camera bothers me more than anything else cuz it makes it really jerky when
I'm panning uh the ID and materials are excellent the front-facing speakers are
not quite HTC1 level they're really not
but it is a way to achieve better sounding sound without putting like a
huge oversized speaker like what Samsung did with the Note 2 let's move into what
I didn't like I don't like the variety there's a 16 gig skew and a 16 gig skew
and that is it I understand why they did it if they offered a 32 gig skew theyd
probably have to charge about another $100 for it which would move it pretty
darn close in pricing to the regular one and at that point you are getting so
much more for your money here this just would feel ridiculous I think HTC wisely
decided that that skew didn't make any sense because it probably wasn't going to sell this is a more value oriented
skew not necessarily for people buying a standalone phone but more for people
buying on contract where we're not talking the difference between you know
$500 and $400 actually the difference is a bit bigger than that but we're talking
the difference between like $200 on contract and $100 on contract or $50 on
contract that's who the phone is targeted uh the typical slower support
for Android updates for lower-end models 4.3 is rolling out to the one I've seen
absolutely no word of it for the One Mini although it is a very new phone so we'll see and the typical much lower
spec please anyone who's listening make
a high-end smaller Android phone I beg of you it would be great one that really
feels premium um but I mean I understand
why it's not done honestly I didn't feel it in day-to-day use that it was slower
than the one or bothered me it's butter smooth to use the only exception being
when you're installing an application in the in the background and you're doing
something intensive in the foreground you can feel it a little bit but there's
more factors than just CPU speed and RAM for that sometimes the speed of the emmc
flash drives that they're using on these things can be a big factor there as well
though I haven't tested the speed on this one no expandable storage still and
the camera app just really isn't that fantastic aside from having support for
Zo I I find their Gallery app is better than their camera app changing settings
you have to dig pretty deep within the menus to make changes and things like
their their white balance for video isn't always Great Indoors so you have
to change it to like tungsten or something like that to get reasonable white balance um I've seen better ones
it's not the worst thing ever but let's move this into discussing the whole form
factor thing 4.3 in versus 4.7 in which
one is for you if you have extremely small hands then you might be stuck with
something like an iPhone 5S or something like a One Mini or something like an S4
mini um if you are able to handle the bigger phone I it's hard to not
recommend it especially if you're just buying an unlocked phone because the
hardware you're getting the capability you're getting is much broader and much
better I wish and I mean Samsung's just as guilty of this as anyone else I wish
that these mid-range phones weren't so cut down in fact I was a little bit
frustrated with the Samsung rep telling me that the S4 Mini was basically just
an S4 but smaller cuz it's not it actually runs similar Hardware to what
you find in the One Mini and it has that same S4 plastic build to the point where
I'd say it's probably worth the extra few bucks to go with something like this
so at the end of all this do I have a conclusion and recommendation not really
I hope that this gave you some idea of what my thoughts are on the One Mini but
it's not as simple as go buy or don't go by because it's a very personal choice
when going with something like this but at the end of the day I'm not going to
switch to it I tried it out um and I'd
rather suffer with not being able to use it one-handed all the time and go with
the HTC1 moving forward like this video
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