HTC One Mini Smartphone Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,540 words · ~12 min read
0:06
the fractal designed toine R4 case gets featured on the wow build logs of the
0:10
week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it welcome
0:14
to an unboxing that I am super stoked on
0:18
or at least I was until I broke open the
0:22
seal on it and actually played around with it a fair bit before I got started
0:25
this is the HTC1 mini and this particular one is an AT&T version from
0:30
the US so if you're here in Canada then I have no idea how you'd get one comes
0:33
with a little bit of documentation wow that's in there really
0:37
good comes with a phone that you have to like actually legit pull on the tab in
0:41
order to remove comes with HTC's Sim changing tool which is holy crap it's
0:47
like they don't want you to take this thing apart comes with a wall wart some
0:50
HTC stickers and a micro USB cable
0:53
really wish micro USB would go away or at least be replaced by something better
0:56
but that is fine so so yeah the HTC One
1:02
Mini let's go ahead and turn this baby on and go through what is interesting
1:06
and not interesting about it so let's start with the hardware spec I was
1:10
probably being unrealistic but when I first heard about the One Mini I was
1:14
really expecting this but smaller and that really isn't what happen so of
1:20
course it's a smaller screen this I understand it's a 4.3 versus a 4.7in
1:24
display and in terms of real size that
1:27
makes more of a difference than you'd think 4 in does so there's our size
1:32
comparison against the full-sized HTC1
1:35
it also downgrades to a 720p screen which I don't mind yet again because the
1:39
display density is still very good because it's smaller so you don't see
1:43
any of the individual pixels but what I really didn't like was the downgrade to
1:47
a super LCD 2 display um this gives it
1:51
still great viewing angles but somewhat yellowish whites um somewhat less deep
1:56
blacks as well as a noticeable difference in color depth which is
2:02
mostly noticeable when you're looking at things like a list of emails where
2:06
they're colorcoded you know off white for un red and then white for red and
2:11
it's a little bit harder to tell the difference and it's not a huge deal you
2:14
can tell the difference unlike older TN LCDs on computers but it just is a
2:18
little bit more fatiguing it still has the two front-facing boom sound speakers
2:22
although they really don't go as loud as the ones built into the original one and
2:26
it still has the UltraPixel camera if I was going to say there's something that
2:30
I really do like about this phone it's the fact that it still has that 4
2:33
megapixel camera with large pixels and
2:37
the f2.0 aperture meaning you get great low light performance but it lacks the
2:41
optical image stabilization of the HTC1 CPU wise the One Mini uses an S400 1.4
2:47
GHz dual core versus the 1.7 GHz quad
2:52
core S600 in the HTC1 and this brings with it a couple of other disadvantages
2:56
as well so it uses an adreno 305 GPU which is is much less powerful but n
3:01
less of a big deal than you might think because a 720p display has fewer than
3:05
half as many pixels as a 1080p display so if you're gaming you you don't
3:09
actually need the horsepower to nearly the same extent but it also means that
3:13
it uses a different so that doesn't include Wireless AC support which is
3:18
pretty awesome with the HTC1 it's just faster Wi-Fi if you happen to have an AC
3:22
router so it only goes up to Wireless N it uses sense 5 it runs Android 4.2.2
3:27
and it has an 1800 Milah battery which combined with the lower power requirements gives it similar battery
3:31
life to the one which I usually get through a day so there's one out of
3:35
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
3:39
pretty heavily software wise let's talk about zo so the camera is I really like
3:45
the camera um zo are something that I don't use a whole lot so it's this
3:49
little button over here and it allows you to take short little whoops sorry it
3:54
allows you to take short little video clips that basically are supposed to
3:58
capture a snippet of life to me I feel like if I wanted to do that in much the
4:02
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
4:07
do that I would just record a short video and then I would use their excellent highlight reels feature in
4:11
order to re in order to review it and highlight reels has actually gotten
4:14
better already so it takes your pictures and videos from a given event or
4:18
location and then puts them into a nice little 30- second thing that has some
4:22
like panning effects and zooming effects and stuff like that it puts it to music
4:25
and starting with the HTC1 mini you no longer are stuck with the music that
4:29
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
4:34
blink feed which is supposed to be a big selling point of sense I personally
4:38
don't use it at all I'm more of a
4:41
content creator as opposed to a Content consumer so if I had a lot of people
4:45
that I followed I'm much more likely to use blink feed but I tend to go straight
4:49
to the sources for things that I'm interested in knowing about so maybe I'm
4:53
a bit oldfashioned that way but I don't use blink feed at all on hand usage this
4:58
is where we're getting into things that I start to really like about the phone
5:01
it's really really nice when doing something as simple as typing a text
5:06
message to actually be able to reach that Q button I don't need it often but
5:10
when I do need the Q button I really need to press it with that said it's not
5:15
perfect the plastic band around the outside of the phone is very glossy and
5:20
actually quite slippery to the point where I honestly had a little bit of
5:23
trouble holding on to it even though it is much smaller why don't we take this
5:27
as an opportunity to talk about something else I really liked which is the industrial design of the phone it's
5:32
much much more beautiful than something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 which borrows
5:35
a lot of the plastic elements from the full-sized S4 it's got that beautifully
5:40
finished aluminum on the back it's got the aluminum front pieces here where the
5:44
speaker grills however the speaker girls are not manufactured with the same level
5:48
of precision as the HTC1 you can see the spacing is actually less dense I do know
5:52
that this was a challenge to get those micro holes drilled that closely
5:56
together and one thing that did sort of irk me a little bit was there's a lift
6:00
on the plastic here so you can actually hear that so it's not quite completely
6:04
flush along the front of the phone other than that it's pretty straightforward there's your micro USB on the bottom and
6:09
your volume rocker switches on the side yet another thing I really liked vastly
6:13
improved the volume switches on the HTC1 are really hard to feel when you're
6:18
touching them and which one you're touching and you know how uncomfortable they feel about you touching them uh on
6:22
the top you've got your headphone microphone combo Jack as well as your lock switch which I also feel as an
6:26
improvement over the flush mounted one on the HTC1 your micro SIM slot on the
6:31
side and other than that um yeah front-facing camera light sensor back
6:35
facing camera all these all these good things Beats Audio is still completely
6:39
unnecessary you should just pick up an audio player with an EQ such as power
6:42
ramp and you can go ahead and set that up and it does come with 25 gigabytes of
6:46
Dropbox so let's get into the more of the reviewy stuff the things I liked and
6:50
didn't like let's talk about the screen 720p is a great resolution for a screen
6:54
this size however the super LCD 2 screen
6:57
here just is plain not as good as the one on the HTC1 I didn't find it
7:02
bothered me just looking at it but when I compare them side by side and I go oh
7:06
man the one's really not that much more expensive um it's hard to justify going
7:10
with this the camera really liked it all it lacks is Optical image stabilization
7:15
and I have pretty steady hands and often I find Optical image stabilization
7:18
particularly when it's not really well implemented like on our xa20 $2,000
7:23
camera bothers me more than anything else cuz it makes it really jerky when
7:26
I'm panning uh the ID and materials are excellent the front-facing speakers are
7:30
not quite HTC1 level they're really not
7:34
but it is a way to achieve better sounding sound without putting like a
7:38
huge oversized speaker like what Samsung did with the Note 2 let's move into what
7:42
I didn't like I don't like the variety there's a 16 gig skew and a 16 gig skew
7:47
and that is it I understand why they did it if they offered a 32 gig skew theyd
7:51
probably have to charge about another $100 for it which would move it pretty
7:55
darn close in pricing to the regular one and at that point you are getting so
7:59
much more for your money here this just would feel ridiculous I think HTC wisely
8:04
decided that that skew didn't make any sense because it probably wasn't going to sell this is a more value oriented
8:09
skew not necessarily for people buying a standalone phone but more for people
8:14
buying on contract where we're not talking the difference between you know
8:17
$500 and $400 actually the difference is a bit bigger than that but we're talking
8:21
the difference between like $200 on contract and $100 on contract or $50 on
8:26
contract that's who the phone is targeted uh the typical slower support
8:30
for Android updates for lower-end models 4.3 is rolling out to the one I've seen
8:34
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
8:40
spec please anyone who's listening make
8:43
a high-end smaller Android phone I beg of you it would be great one that really
8:47
feels premium um but I mean I understand
8:51
why it's not done honestly I didn't feel it in day-to-day use that it was slower
8:56
than the one or bothered me it's butter smooth to use the only exception being
9:00
when you're installing an application in the in the background and you're doing
9:03
something intensive in the foreground you can feel it a little bit but there's
9:07
more factors than just CPU speed and RAM for that sometimes the speed of the emmc
9:12
flash drives that they're using on these things can be a big factor there as well
9:16
though I haven't tested the speed on this one no expandable storage still and
9:19
the camera app just really isn't that fantastic aside from having support for
9:23
Zo I I find their Gallery app is better than their camera app changing settings
9:27
you have to dig pretty deep within the menus to make changes and things like
9:31
their their white balance for video isn't always Great Indoors so you have
9:35
to change it to like tungsten or something like that to get reasonable white balance um I've seen better ones
9:40
it's not the worst thing ever but let's move this into discussing the whole form
9:44
factor thing 4.3 in versus 4.7 in which
9:47
one is for you if you have extremely small hands then you might be stuck with
9:51
something like an iPhone 5S or something like a One Mini or something like an S4
9:56
mini um if you are able to handle the bigger phone I it's hard to not
10:01
recommend it especially if you're just buying an unlocked phone because the
10:05
hardware you're getting the capability you're getting is much broader and much
10:09
better I wish and I mean Samsung's just as guilty of this as anyone else I wish
10:13
that these mid-range phones weren't so cut down in fact I was a little bit
10:17
frustrated with the Samsung rep telling me that the S4 Mini was basically just
10:20
an S4 but smaller cuz it's not it actually runs similar Hardware to what
10:24
you find in the One Mini and it has that same S4 plastic build to the point where
10:30
I'd say it's probably worth the extra few bucks to go with something like this
10:33
so at the end of all this do I have a conclusion and recommendation not really
10:39
I hope that this gave you some idea of what my thoughts are on the One Mini but
10:42
it's not as simple as go buy or don't go by because it's a very personal choice
10:47
when going with something like this but at the end of the day I'm not going to
10:50
switch to it I tried it out um and I'd
10:53
rather suffer with not being able to use it one-handed all the time and go with
10:57
the HTC1 moving forward like this video
11:01
if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let us
11:04
know what you thought about it if you had feelings that were more complex than that we don't do much mobile phone stuff
11:09
so giving us your feedback does allow us to improve it for you moving into the
11:13
future and as always guys check out the linest tips.com Forum if you want to
11:17
discuss any of the cool technology we talk about on this channel and as always
11:21
don't forget to
11:28
subscribe he