The HTC One Mini 2 is the HTC One’s little brother. The device has 1gb of RAM, a 1 GHz ARM processor and a 720p display.
Design
For design, the Mini 2 has two grey accents at the top and bottom of the display. It also has the two BoomSound speakers which sound absolutely amazing on the two accents, along with sensors and front facing camera. On the back of the device is a smooth aluminium design with the camera and flash. There are a few things that I would have to fault with the design is the HTC logo on the front and the bezel around the screen, which are both larger than I would like. And when the phone is on a table and you are touching the screen it rocks. The device is just under 13.5cm tall and 0.7mm thin, and even though it is called the Mini, it is around the same size as the Galaxy S4.
Software
The Mini 2 ships with HTC Sense 6, which is HTC’s Android skin, I quite like this skin because it is subtle and you still have the essence of Android, compared to Samsung’s TouchWiz, in which they are completely trying to remove any evidence of Android or Google. But back to HTC, Sense 6 is really clean and contains HTC’s BlinkFeed technology which lets you take a glance at all of your social networks in one go, which can be a great time saver. Software runs responsively on the device and HTC Sense is not laggy and has definitely been optimized for the device, which helps in making a consistent user experience.
Display
The Mini 2 contains a 4.5 inch 720p LCD display. The colours on the display are bright and colourful but I do wish that the resolution of the screen was a bit higher as I can see the pixels, which can be annoying when looking at the screen for large amounts of time.
Camera
The Mini 2 sports a 13 megapixel camera on the back and a 5 megapixel camera on the front, the camera produces good photos in decent lighting but when there is not a good amount of lighting, the camera begins to struggle. The camera can also do 1080p video recording, slow motion video recording and high speed video recording at 60fps. Below I have put some same photos and a demo of the slow motion video. The device comes with 16gb of memory, so if you plan on taking lots of slow motion video you can add a microSD card with memory up to 128gb of storage.
Overall for the camera I think it is good for taking decent photos, but if you want to be taking high quality photos in all lighting conditions you may want to look at other devices.
Performance
Despite the device only having 1gb of RAM, performance is good on the Mini 2, I could quickly open lots of apps without the phone freezing or performing slowly. App opening times took around 3 seconds depending on how resource intensive the app is. I was able to play games with high quality graphics such as Asphalt 8 and Leo’s Fortune (above) without any problems and with good performance, the only thing I would say is that the back of the device got warm when graphics intense games are played on the device. I did some benchmarks on the device in Geekbench and this device gets around the same score as the Motorola Moto G.
Battery Life
The battery inside is 2110mAh, which is a step up from the previous version. The battery will last all day if you plan on using the phone lightly but if you begin to do things such as streaming music, videos or gaming then the battery percentage will begin to drop very quickly. You also need to take into account that batteries cannot be swapped with this device unlike other phones.
Conclusion
Overall I think that the HTC One Mini 2 is a great device for people that listen to music and love a high quality phone build. If you’re not bothered about those then you might as well look at devices such as the Motorola Moto G because that phone gets the same amount of performance for a cheaper price.
