HTC HD Mini

Editor's Review of the HD Mini

HTC has made great strides with the Google Android operating system. The mobile phone company came up with the first Android handset: the HTC Dream. It has since released different Android models, so releasing the HTC HD Mini last quarter and having it run on Windows Mobile operating system was quite refreshing.

Weighing in at 110 grams with the battery in place and with dimensions of around 103.8 mm x 57.7 mm x 11.7 mm, the HTC HD Mini is one of the lightest and smallest smartphones available in the market today.

The HTC HD Mini has one very obvious difference from other smartphones in the same price range: its metal casing. The black metal gives it an elegant look, effortlessly. In fact, it is this elegant and beautiful appeal that makes the HTC HD Mini an irresistible buy, because it is simply obvious that much thought and deliberation has been put into the design.

Amazingly, the HTC HD Mini's look is very adaptable. You could be a businessman and look good with this phone, and you could be a student in jeans and this phone would not look out of place.

The phone has an advertised talk time of more than 400 minutes and standby time of up to 500 hours on a WCDMA network and 340 hours on GSM. This translates to 12 hours of non-stop listening to MP3s or 8 hours of watching videos. It also boasts of a 600 megahertz of CPU Processing Speed. It has 512 MB of read-only memory and 384 MB of built-in RAM. Do not fret, however, if you think that would not be enough for all your videos and MP3 or MP4 files, you can pop in a 32 gigabyte microSD card for all the things you need to store on your phone.

As for the features, it has a 5 megapixel camera at the back that allows for wide screen photo capture and a built-in autofocus feature.

As for connectivity, the HTC HD Mini is easily connected to a computer via a micro-USB connection, although you could also dock it into your stereo system. It is Bluetooth-capable and can connect to the Internet via 3G, GPRS, EDGE, and wireless connections. It also has a built-in GPS antenna.

And because it runs on Windows, you can watch your videos and listen to music using Windows Media Player. The phone supports a wide range of audio and video formats. More than this, it features an FM radio.

But what is probably the HTC HD Mini's coolest feature is the ability to automatically change its ringer volume. In your pocket, the ringer volume is high, but take it out and the phone automatically lowers it. It can also go on mute if you put your phone face down, which should come in handy when you are in a meeting.

Limitations

Most people love the sleek design of the HTC HD Mini, but some find the screws unappealing. Set at the four corners of the back panel, the screws do provide a distraction, which, along with the speaker and the camera, almost ruins the look of the phone's back.

At 5 megapixels, the camera is good enough. But this does not mean that it could provide quality pictures at night or in low light conditions. The addition of a decent flash could have improved it.

Furthermore, those who are used to bigger screens on Smartphones would find the 3.2 inch touch screen display very limiting. One proof is that the HTC HD Mini's home screen does not feature as many applications as Android phones. This, however, is more of a fault of the operating system. Windows Mobile is a great OS but it simply fails in comparison to Android systems.

Lastly, the touch screen is not really as responsive as it should. While HTC has made sure that main functions are easily activated from the home screen, the navigation is quite slow due to this unresponsiveness. The unresponsiveness problem is magnified if you are using the keyboard to compose an SMS message, you will surely notice how inaccurate you can get and how slow the HTC HD Mini is. It is more obvious if you have used the keyboard on another HTC phone like the HTC Legend.