HTC already offers a beautifully crafted Android smartphone with the One M8 – but for all its beauty, it sure is big. So for those who put a premium on pocket space (or pocket change) comes a smaller, cheaper alternative. The new HTC One mini 2 hits shelves this summer with a mission to bring the One M8’s high-end user experience to the midsize category.
But the landscape of mini smartphones is a pockmarked one, cratered with cut corners and dotted with disappointment. Is the One mini 2 truly something different, or just another compromise in disguise?
Let’s find out.
Video Review · Specs & Hardware · Software · Camera · Performance
Pros/Cons · Pricing/Availability · Conclusion · Scored For Me
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HTC One mini 2 Review Video
See the above comparison –and Adam Z. Lein’s photo shootout– to get the whole picture. Despite its lower resolution, we’d take the One M8’s camera over the One mini 2’s any day of the week. There’s a variety of reasons for this, chief among them low-light performance, color balance, and contrast. The M8 just produces prettier pictures to our eyes.
Taken by itself, the One mini 2’s 13MP shooter is best described as “adequate.” Pictures in good lighting are fine: the camera defaults to 9.6 MP if you want to preserve a 16:9 aspect ratio, but you can manually crank it up to 13MP if you want all the zoomability that higher resolution provides (so long as you don’t mind shooting 4:3 photos). There’s no Duo Camera functionality due to the lack of a dedicated depth sensor, but such tricks are easily replicated with apps like Google Camera, and there’s no shortage of photo enhancements in HTC’s viewfinder software.
On the whole, the One mini 2’s pictures emerge looking quite flat. Colors are less vibrant than in real life, with brightly-lit areas tending to overexpose quite easily. Both problems are exacerbated by the phone’s too-aggressive HDR mode and the propensity of HTC’s exposure controls to dramatically overcompensate when using tap-to-focus, neither of which is a new problem.
Even without taking into account the excellent low-light performance of the One M8, Xperia Z2, or Microsoft’s Lumia line, night shooting with the One mini 2 is flat-out bad. That’s true even using the phone’s dedicated Night mode, which slows the viewfinder’s performance to a crawl, yet seems to have little or no effect on the dim and noisy end results (“duplicate” photos shown were taken with different shooting modes).