The HTC One was one of my favorite phones from the first half of the year. I’ve always been a big fan of HTC, especially their build quality. In fact, I’m probably the only one that was always liked Sense. I’ve owned many HTC phones in the past, but have since gone the Nexus-only route. Not too long ago, I had my hands on the black HTC One, but I didn’t do a review. Our editor, Tom Dawson, did his review quite a while ago, so there was no need for me to do another one. Today, AT&T dropped off a new toy, the HTC One Mini. Which was announced last week, and hit store shelves on Friday. In comparison to the HTC One, it’s very similar. It has the same look and feel, except it has a smaller 4.3-inch display with is a Super LCD2 720p display (1280×720). I’m actually a big fan of Super LCD displays, and this one looks gorgeous, especially at this size. It also has a smaller battery at just 1800mAh, along with a dual-core Snapdragon 400 processor. That’s the same processor that’s inside the Galaxy Mega 6.3 which I reviewed over the weekend. It is running Android 4.2.2 with Sense 5. It’s smooth as butter.
Surprisingly, it’s about the same size as the Nexus 4. Even though the screen is 4.3-inches vs the 4.7 inch display on the Nexus 4. That’s largely because of the capacitive buttons and the front-facing speakers. Which speaking of the speakers, they are just as great as those on the HTC One. Like I said about the HTC One, you’re going to want to put your phone on silent at night. Unless you like getting the crap scared out of you. I was working earlier and an email came through to the One Mini and literally scared the crap out of me, it’s so loud. It also features the same 4MP (well technically UltraPixel) camera as on the HTC One. I thought the camera on the One was pretty good, but many others have said otherwise, so we’ll test it out quite a bit for the full review. There’s no IR blaster in the power button, unfortunately, but I didn’t use that feature too much anyways. The HTC One Mini does come with 16GB of internal storage and no microSD card slot. Which is plenty for me, but might not be for others.
So far I’m really liking One Mini, which is essentially the HTC First, which I reviewed earlier this summer and really liked. While I do love the larger displays like the Galaxy Note 2 and the Galaxy Mega 6.3. It’s nice to have a smaller phone as well, especially one that can have a big battery and last through a normal day for me. We’ll be putting the HTC One Mini through it’s paces all week long and have a full review out sometime this weekend.