HTC One mini 2 Review

Final Words

The < $400 smartphone market is expected to grow tremendously over the coming years. With the One mini 2, HTC targets the upper end of the midrange segment - betting on the style and materials that sell its high end smartphones working at lower price points as well. 

The One mini 2's design, material and build quality are all excellent. For some, the mini 2's size may even be preferrable to the bigger M8. In the transition to a lower price point, the mini 2 does lose a good amount of metal but the device doesn't feel substantially worse for it. I don't know that there's a better feeling smartphone priced below $400. It's clear that the One mini 2's design is its biggest selling point.

While the industrial and material design is equal to the One (M8) and great for the asking price, the value proposition loses strength once we look at the rest of the components. Starting with the camera, although promising on the surface, it's underperforming compared to last year's flagships. While the camera quality is most definitely better than what you can find in the Moto G, it’s a far cry from the LG G2, and is slightly worse than the Samsung Galaxy S4 in this department. It’s hard not to suggest that the OmniVision sensor may also have a part in this, as low light sensitivity is quite poor. Overall, for the price that HTC is asking, the LG G2 is a far better choice when it comes to camera.

It’s not just the camera that has issues for the asking price, the display is too. In short, the poor color accuracy across the board, excessively blue white point, and obvious oversaturation makes this display a disappointment. This is especially surprising because for the longest time in the Android space, HTC led the way when it came to display quality. Now, rather than continuing to push the bar in display accuracy, HTC has stagnated in this department, and even regressed. It’s obvious that HTC is still using high quality panels with low color shift with viewing angle changes and generally high brightness, but the accuracy simply isn’t there. At the same time, Google, Samsung, LG, and others in the Android space continue to push their displays towards even higher standards of accuracy and panel quality. Even if the calibration out of the box isn’t intended to be accurate at all, most of these OEMs provide some way to get an accurate calibration in the display settings. HTC would do well to offer the same options.

In the SoC department, while performance is good, it’s not much of an improvement from last year, and compared to the other phones in this segment, it’s just not enough. Snapdragon 410 would’ve been much more interesting and likely a better fit for the price, but as it is, this should be priced near the Moto G LTE, not the LG G2.

It may just be that I am too demanding. After all, this is ultimately a decent phone. The sound experience is still just as good as it is on the One (M8), battery life is solid, the display’s panel quality is still good despite the poor calibration, the in hand feel and design is one of the best on the market, and performance is acceptable, although not great. The biggest issue that this phone has is price. I started this section with the assertion that this phone is emblematic of the problem that HTC has with the One mini line, and this is where it shows. The One mini 2 is torn between high end materials and lower cost internals, what it's lacking is balance. Give the mini 2 a better calibrated display, a slightly better camera and a higher performing SoC, and I think we'd be closer to a balanced device at this price point. Alternatively, at a lower price point the One mini 2 would be an obvious upsell over a Moto G LTE. As it stands, the One mini 2 is stuck between those two worlds.