On 5th August 2013, I bought this phone while it's off-contract price was still hot and I said to myself, this phone must be great. I kept the Galaxy S4 mini in my home for two and a half months without a SIM card placed inside it and have used it only for writing to this website and recording videos and later on began carrying it with me and using it everyday. Below are my thoughts on the device as someone who has owned it for half a year now.
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As you all know, the Galaxy S4 mini is the little brother of Samsung's flagship smartphone for the year 2013, the Galaxy S4, so it is bound to have the exact same design in the front and the back. One of the first things that you will notice is its screen. I personally am not a fan of huge phones and I find this to be the perfect size for a smartphone as it can be easily used with one hand. The quality of the display is simply gorgeous. The color reproduction is amazing and it's stupendously bright. The only issue that I have with the display is the given resolution which unfortunately is not even HD but qHD and that can be an issue for certain situations such as watching YouTube videos in HD resolution.
The phone is quite slim with silver-colored bezels and looks very beautiful. But a huge problem for me is the back cover. It feels extremely slippery in my hands and no, they are not sweaty, it's just how the back cover of this phone feels like and that lead me to actually purchase a protective cover with a more rough feel in fear of dropping it some day. I think Samsung should try and look for some improvements on this matter in the future.
The phone comes with a Li-Ion 1900 mAh battery and is very durable for daily use. You can listen to music for hours and hours and barely a small percentage would drop. I mostly play games such as Hill Climb Racing, Angry Birds series, and the phone manages to stay on for a very long time, keeping me entertained. I can't say the same for internet browsing though, once you turn on that 3G and begin chatting or whatever else you do, it begins to drop quite fast. In some situations while browsing the web, this phone would become quite hot that it could even scare you and make you put it aside for a bit, but that happens very rare (go figure).
The camera in my opinion is just amazing for a smartphone camera. The phone comes with two cameras, one front and one rear. The front camera surprisingly takes very nice quality photos and the rear camera is even better. Samsung has also provided us with some neat presets and of course, other customization settings in the pre-installed Camera application. It takes high quality photos especially with the HDR feature turned on and captures clear videos but one huge problem is the microphone. When I previewed my video, the audio was simply a disaster. It's very sensitive to noise generated from my hands while holding it and even small wind in the background can end up ruining the joy of watching your captured videos.
Let's see now, we are lastly gonna take a look at the specifications that this phone comes with. We are given a dual-core processor clocked at 1.7GHz and 1.5GB of RAM. That should be enough to be able to play high-end games, right? It definitely is. I took the effort to test some HD games on the phone and it manages to run them as smooth as butter. This takes me back to my statement above about heat, but that should be normal I guess as we're talking about 3D games here with high-quality graphics.
Final conclusionSpecs wise, this phone is powerful and is definitely like a small computer that you carry on your pocket. The build quality is not that great, as I already mentioned above, it feels very slippery in the hands and what ruins this mostly for me is the fact that this phone came in the market here with the same price that the Galaxy S3 was being offered for, even a bit higher than it. I honestly don't have any complaints about this phone other than the above mentioned ones for its slippery feel, lack of HD resolution and awful audio quality on the videos.
So what are your thoughts about the Galaxy S4 mini? Is it a good phone or Samsung could have done better?
