We’ve been hearing that Oppo was ready to launch a smaller version of their N1 device from last year, but many of us thought that these were simply rumors and that Oppo already had decent enough low-end hardware on offer. That was until Oppo announced the device would become clear on May 30th and sure enough the N1 Mini has burst on to the Chinese manufacturer’s website with a few details and some specs in tow. The device still hasn’t been officially announced by Oppo, this is said to happen June 10th, with the company holding an event to show off all the new features and specs of the device.
We don’t know everything about the device, but we do know that the N1 Mini comes in at 5-inches – which is a considerable drop from the 6-inch original – and will feature the same 13-megapixel f/2.0 camera module from Sony that Oppo put on a swivel hinge for great selfies as well as landscapes and such. What isn’t so clear however, is just what the N1 is packing underneath the hood. If Oppo are going to be positioning this to those that couldn’t afford the full-price N1, then we’d expect something like a MediaTek MT6592, but we’ll be hoping for a Snapdragon 600 like its bigger brother. Oppo’s page does in fact list 4G LTE support, so we’re assuming a Snapdragon CPU over a MediaTek one, but we’ll have to wait and see to get concrete specs on this guy.
The N1 was a nice device, and offered a taste of something unique to the smartphone buyer that had seen it all before, but at 6-inches, it was hard to ignore the large size of the device, which put a lot of people off. Whether or not Oppo have followed Sony’s lead and come up with a more ‘compact’ version of the same N1 or a ‘Mini’ device that lives up to the name in specs as well as size will be interesting to see. We know the camera is the same as its big brother’s, so maybe the internals are as well? We’ll be waiting to find out and if we have any more info, we’ll be sure to cover it.