2013 has been a bit of an odd year,for Smartphones that is, Every year we are basically conditioned to believe that we want the biggest and best phones that are available at that time, but that's actually changing,This year we have seen OEM's create "mini" versions of their phones, and for once,
They.Don't.Suck
This, is the Galaxy S4 Mini, From Samsung, it doesn't have the most mind-blowing specs , its a dual-core Snapdragon 400 (Krait 300) , it's got an 8MP camera from the Galaxy S III, it's pretty thin and pretty light, it's got a 4.3" qHD (960x540) Super AMOLED screen, also the Design of the Galaxy S4 and some other stuff.
And guess what, it's doesn't lag,and the Minor bits of lag that are there are Touchwiz based,which are being remedied as we speak, same as the Larger Galaxy S4, which ad software glitches which caused it to lag, they are being ironed out as we speak.
And yes, the Screen might not be HD, but it kinda doesn't need to be, would it have been nicer? yes, but we wouldn't have had 720p S-AMOLED screen, and Super AMOLED is what we are using on the qHD panel, which has ridiculously bright and vivid colours, though, slightly over saturated sometimes, and the deepest blacks ever, because it's an AMOLED panel, it doesn't switch on the Black pixels, making them,literally, black, also, this isn't a PenTile screen of old, its not a full RGB stripe like a S-AMOLED Plus screen, but it's S Stripe RGB which is slightly different, anyway, the point is, the screen doesn't suck and you'll be happy.
And performance shouldn't be any slouch either, The S4 Mini uses a Snapdragon 400, but it uses the Higher end version with the Krait 300 cores, and it has the relatively beefy Adreno 305 GPU,so this thing is able to push quite a few pixels, and its helped by the fact that it has a qHD screen. The Snapdragon 400 with Krait 300 is faster than the Dual-Core Snapdragon S4 that was in the flagship phones like the American Galaxy S4 and the America HTC One X, they used the Krait 200 architecture, and Krait 300 has about a 10-15% improvement Over Krait 200, though those where clocked a few hundred megahertz higher, so they equal out,but the Snapdragon 400 has the better GPU, so yeah, Snapdragon 400 wins anyway, but then add in the Krait 300 has the S4 Mini uses, it's a beefy little sucker.
It's Camera is also pretty damn good, remember the Galaxy S III, remember how much everyone liked that camera? yeah well its the same Camera, and it also has Samsung's great post processing done afterwards, so the Camera isn't a concern either.
Oh and it has LTE, and NFC and Micro SD and a removable battery, so yeah, this should be pretty great.
Now this, is the HTC One Mini, it's a pretty awesome phone, i personally don't think it's a very attractive phone, but that is my personal opinion, but there are certain things that i cannot deny about this phone, it's fast, it's well built and it has a pretty decent/comparable camera and a frankly phenomenal screen.
Lets start with that Screen shall we, and i must say, for an LCD (I'm more of an AMOLED fan) this thing is really ,really nice, it has relatively dark blacks (but not AMOLED dark,which is,you know ... off) and it's bright with super white whites and super accurate colours, but some people (myself included) prefer the "Wow look at me I'm Green" of AMOLED to the "I'm green, and this is how I'm supposed to look" of LCD, but i digress, the One Mini has a lovely screen, add on top of that the fact it is 720p and this super accurate screen also just became extremely dense, like 342ppi dense, which is gorgeous, if you have ever had the pleasure of using or seeing a HTC 8X up close you know the screen i am talking about, it's pretty damn perfect for what it is.
And performance wise, this isn't any slouch either, it's got the Same Krait 300 based Snapdragon 400 as the S4 Mini, clocked at 1.4Ghz compared to the 1.7Ghz on the S4 Mini with the Same Adreno 305 GPU, and I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say next, the performance compared to their full sized counterparts is negligible ,with fractions of a second between reaching the phone or opening the viewfinder in the camera to opening the App tray, they are so similar its scary.
Speaking of the Camera, the One Mini uses the Same 4 Ultra Pixel camera as the Full sized HTC One, they just Removed the Optical Image Stabilisation from the full sized One to reduce cost and size for the Pint sized little brother, now i personally never found the Ultra Pixel camera in either One (Pun intended) to be impressive, in daylight on low light shots, i know HTC optimised and hyped the fact the Ultra pixel sensor lets in a lot more light than standard Smartphone cameras does,but i found there to be way to much post processing and artifacts on Both Ones for my liking, the GS4 Mini isn't much better, but the GS4 Mini doesn't hype up it's low light capabilities.
Like the Big One (he he) The One Mini doesn't have a Micro SD slot so therefore is locked to its 16GB (about 10gb user accessible) built in storage, it also has 1GB of RAM (The S4 Mini has 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage,but it has a Micro SD slot).
So we've seen that this year, the Mid rangers from the Companies line ups are getting really good, so good in fact that some people wonder why they would even want to get the larger variants, i mean personally, if i could afford to, i would buy my mother an HTC One Mini over a full sized HTC One ( she really likes HTC's so that's what she wants to carry on with) because it's smaller, it'd fit into her hands better, it wouldn't be as heavy etc.
But you dont seem to be taking as much of a hit this year on Mid-rangers as you have in years past, if we look at last year, the S3 Mini, it had a 4" WVGA PenTile AMOLED screen with a Dual-Core NovaThor SoC, which is just sad, this years is much much much better.
So What do you guys think? should people Consider a mid-range phone the next time their upgrade comes along? do you agree or disagree, leave your comments below.
-Dom
They.Don't.Suck
This, is the Galaxy S4 Mini, From Samsung, it doesn't have the most mind-blowing specs , its a dual-core Snapdragon 400 (Krait 300) , it's got an 8MP camera from the Galaxy S III, it's pretty thin and pretty light, it's got a 4.3" qHD (960x540) Super AMOLED screen, also the Design of the Galaxy S4 and some other stuff.And guess what, it's doesn't lag,and the Minor bits of lag that are there are Touchwiz based,which are being remedied as we speak, same as the Larger Galaxy S4, which ad software glitches which caused it to lag, they are being ironed out as we speak.
And yes, the Screen might not be HD, but it kinda doesn't need to be, would it have been nicer? yes, but we wouldn't have had 720p S-AMOLED screen, and Super AMOLED is what we are using on the qHD panel, which has ridiculously bright and vivid colours, though, slightly over saturated sometimes, and the deepest blacks ever, because it's an AMOLED panel, it doesn't switch on the Black pixels, making them,literally, black, also, this isn't a PenTile screen of old, its not a full RGB stripe like a S-AMOLED Plus screen, but it's S Stripe RGB which is slightly different, anyway, the point is, the screen doesn't suck and you'll be happy.
And performance shouldn't be any slouch either, The S4 Mini uses a Snapdragon 400, but it uses the Higher end version with the Krait 300 cores, and it has the relatively beefy Adreno 305 GPU,so this thing is able to push quite a few pixels, and its helped by the fact that it has a qHD screen. The Snapdragon 400 with Krait 300 is faster than the Dual-Core Snapdragon S4 that was in the flagship phones like the American Galaxy S4 and the America HTC One X, they used the Krait 200 architecture, and Krait 300 has about a 10-15% improvement Over Krait 200, though those where clocked a few hundred megahertz higher, so they equal out,but the Snapdragon 400 has the better GPU, so yeah, Snapdragon 400 wins anyway, but then add in the Krait 300 has the S4 Mini uses, it's a beefy little sucker.
It's Camera is also pretty damn good, remember the Galaxy S III, remember how much everyone liked that camera? yeah well its the same Camera, and it also has Samsung's great post processing done afterwards, so the Camera isn't a concern either.
Oh and it has LTE, and NFC and Micro SD and a removable battery, so yeah, this should be pretty great.
Now this, is the HTC One Mini, it's a pretty awesome phone, i personally don't think it's a very attractive phone, but that is my personal opinion, but there are certain things that i cannot deny about this phone, it's fast, it's well built and it has a pretty decent/comparable camera and a frankly phenomenal screen.Lets start with that Screen shall we, and i must say, for an LCD (I'm more of an AMOLED fan) this thing is really ,really nice, it has relatively dark blacks (but not AMOLED dark,which is,you know ... off) and it's bright with super white whites and super accurate colours, but some people (myself included) prefer the "Wow look at me I'm Green" of AMOLED to the "I'm green, and this is how I'm supposed to look" of LCD, but i digress, the One Mini has a lovely screen, add on top of that the fact it is 720p and this super accurate screen also just became extremely dense, like 342ppi dense, which is gorgeous, if you have ever had the pleasure of using or seeing a HTC 8X up close you know the screen i am talking about, it's pretty damn perfect for what it is.
And performance wise, this isn't any slouch either, it's got the Same Krait 300 based Snapdragon 400 as the S4 Mini, clocked at 1.4Ghz compared to the 1.7Ghz on the S4 Mini with the Same Adreno 305 GPU, and I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say next, the performance compared to their full sized counterparts is negligible ,with fractions of a second between reaching the phone or opening the viewfinder in the camera to opening the App tray, they are so similar its scary.
Speaking of the Camera, the One Mini uses the Same 4 Ultra Pixel camera as the Full sized HTC One, they just Removed the Optical Image Stabilisation from the full sized One to reduce cost and size for the Pint sized little brother, now i personally never found the Ultra Pixel camera in either One (Pun intended) to be impressive, in daylight on low light shots, i know HTC optimised and hyped the fact the Ultra pixel sensor lets in a lot more light than standard Smartphone cameras does,but i found there to be way to much post processing and artifacts on Both Ones for my liking, the GS4 Mini isn't much better, but the GS4 Mini doesn't hype up it's low light capabilities.
Like the Big One (he he) The One Mini doesn't have a Micro SD slot so therefore is locked to its 16GB (about 10gb user accessible) built in storage, it also has 1GB of RAM (The S4 Mini has 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage,but it has a Micro SD slot).
So we've seen that this year, the Mid rangers from the Companies line ups are getting really good, so good in fact that some people wonder why they would even want to get the larger variants, i mean personally, if i could afford to, i would buy my mother an HTC One Mini over a full sized HTC One ( she really likes HTC's so that's what she wants to carry on with) because it's smaller, it'd fit into her hands better, it wouldn't be as heavy etc.
But you dont seem to be taking as much of a hit this year on Mid-rangers as you have in years past, if we look at last year, the S3 Mini, it had a 4" WVGA PenTile AMOLED screen with a Dual-Core NovaThor SoC, which is just sad, this years is much much much better.
So What do you guys think? should people Consider a mid-range phone the next time their upgrade comes along? do you agree or disagree, leave your comments below.
-Dom
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