Gadgetory

the fractal design define our for case gets featured on the when show 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 HTC One 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 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 it comes with a wall wart some HTC stickers and a micro USB cable really wish microUSB would go away or at least be replaced by something better but that is fine 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 happened so of course it's a smaller screen this I understand is a 4.3 versus a 4.7 inch display and in terms of real size that makes more of a difference than you'd think point four inches does so there's our size comparison against the full-sized HTC One 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 to display this gives it still great viewing angles but somewhat yellowish whites 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 color-coded you know off-white for on and white four 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 boomsound speakers although they really don't go as loud as the ones built into the original one and it still has the ultra pixel camera if I was gonna say there's something that I really do like about this phone it's the fact that it still has that four megapixel camera with large pixels and the F 2.0 aperture meaning you get great low-light performance but it lacks the optical image stabilization of the HTC one CPU why is the one mini used as an S 400 1.4 gigahertz dual core versus the 1.7 gigahertz quad-core s 600 in the HTC One and this brings with it a couple of other disadvantages as well so it uses an Adreno 305 GPU which is much less powerful but 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 don't actually need the horsepower to nearly the same extent but it also means that it uses a different SOC that doesn't include wireless AC support which is pretty awesome with the HTC One it's just faster Wi-Fi if you happen to have an AC router so it only goes up to Wireless n you use the Sense 5 and runs Android 4.2.2 and it has an 1800 milliamp hour 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 twenty 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 Zoe's so the camera is I really like the camera those 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 in order to review it and highlight rules 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 thirty second thing that has some like panning effects and zooming effects and stuff like that it puts it to music and starting with the HTC One 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 blinkfeed 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 blinkfeed but I tend to go straight to the sources for things that I'm interested in knowing about so maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned that way but I don't use blinkfeed at all one-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 cue button I don't need it often but when I do need the cue 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 HTC One you can see the spacing is actually less dense I do know that this was a challenge to get those micro holes drilled back closely together and one thing that did sort of acne a little bit was there's a lip on the plastic here so you can actually hear that so it's not quite completely flush along the front of the phone although the knot is pretty straightforward there's your microUSB on the bottom and your volume rocker switches on the side yet another thing I really liked vastly improved the volume switches on the HTC One 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 on the top you've got your headphone microphone combo jack as well as your lock switch which I also feel is an improvement over the flush mounted one on the HTC One your Micro SIM slot on the side and other than that yeah front facing camera light sensor back face all these all these good things beatsaudio is still completely unnecessary you should just pick up an audio player with an EQ such as power amp 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 review e 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 to screen here just is plain not as good as the one on the HTC one I didn't find it bothered me just looking at it but when I compare them side-by-side and I go oh man was really not that much more expensive 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 XA $22,000 camera bothers me more than anything else because it makes it really jerky when I'm tanning the idæan materials are excellent the front-facing speakers are not quite HTC one 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 SKU and a 16 gig SKU and that is it I understand why they did it if they offered a 32 gig SKU they'd probably have to charge about another hundred dollars for it which remove it pretty darn close and 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 SKU didn't make any sense because it probably wasn't gonna sell this is a more value oriented SKU 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 five hundred dollars and four hundred dollars are actually the difference is a bit bigger than that but we're talking the difference between like two hundred dollars on contract and a hundred dollars on contract or fifty dollars on contract that's who the phone is targeted 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 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 those 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 seen better ones it's not the worst thing ever but let's move this into discussing the whole form factor thing 4.3 inches versus 4.7 inches 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 one Mini or something like an s4 mini if you are able to handle the bigger phone 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 is 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 Repp 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 buy 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 and I'd rather suffer with not being able to use it one-handed all the time and go with the HTC one moving forward like this video if you liked it like it if you disliked it leave a comment and let us know what you thought about it if you had feelings that were more complex than that we don't do much mobile phone stuff so giving us your feedback doesn't allow us to improve it for you moving into the future and as all these guys check out the Linus tech tips comm forum if you want to discuss any of the cool technology that we talked about on this channel and as always don't forget to subscribe