 The fractal design to find our four case gets featured on the WAN 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'd 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. Comes with a wall wart, some HTC stickers, and a micro USB cable. Really wish micro USB 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 happens. 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.4 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 2 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 unread and then white for 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 boom sound 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 going to 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 wise, the One Mini uses an S400 1.4 gigahertz dual core versus the 1.7 gigahertz quad core S600 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. It uses Sense5, it 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 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 pretty heavily. Software wise, let's talk about zoes. So the camera is, I really like the camera. Zoes 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 review it. And highlight reels 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 30 second thing that has some 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 Q button. I don't need it often, but when I do need the Q 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 grills 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 that closely together. One thing that did sort of irk me a little bit was there's a lip on the plastic here. You can actually hear that, so it's not quite completely flush along the front of the phone. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward. There's your micro USB 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 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, front-facing camera, light sensor, back-facing camera, all these good things. Beats Audio 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 more of the review-y 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 2 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, the one is 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 XA20 $2000 camera, bothers me more than anything else because it makes it really jerky when I'm panning. The ID and 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 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 skew and a 16 gig skew, and that is it. I understand why they did it. If they offered a 32 gig skew, they'd probably have to charge about another $100 for it, which would move it pretty darn close in 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 skew didn't make any sense because it probably wasn't going to sell. This is a more value-oriented skew, not necessarily for people buying a standalone phone, but more for people buying on contract, where we're not talking the difference between $500 and $400. Actually, the difference is a bit bigger than that, but we're talking the difference between like $200 on contract and $100 on contract, or $50 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 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 Zoes, 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. Like 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 a 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's 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 rep telling me that the S4 Mini was basically just an S4 but smaller, because 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, dislike 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 does allow us to improve it for you moving into the future. And as always, guys, check out the LinusTechTips.com forum if you want to discuss any of the cool technology that we talk about on this channel. And as always, don't forget to subscribe.