HTC One mini 2 Review

Battery Life

Battery life is now one of the most important aspects of a phone, and with Snapdragon 801, the 28HPm process brought enormous gains in battery life, enough to near the 12 hour mark for LTE battery life in both the Galaxy S 5 and HTC One (M8). Of course, while the MSM8926, Snapdragon 400 SoC in the One mini 2 is still on 28LP, the change from dual core Krait to quad core A7s, along with a newer MDM9x25 modem and a larger battery is enough to change things up quite a bit. As always, our battery life tests are run at 200 nit display brightness, and we run a standardized workload on the device from a fully charged to fully discharged state.

In WiFi, the One mini 2 has around a seven percent uplift from the One mini, and overall it performs solidly, but Motorola has them beat with the Moto G, which is around 20% better in battery life for this test. The difference in battery life is curious, especially because they have similar resolution, similar battery capacity, and the same SoC. I've also checked and neither has panel self-refresh, so there's nothing glaringly obvious that could cause such a large delta.

In WCDMA, the gap between the two narrows significantly, although Motorola holds about a ten percent lead over the One mini 2.

In order to add tests that stress SoC more heavily, we turn to the GFXBench and Basemark OS rundown tests to get a more complete picture of battery life with the smartphones that we test. The GFXBench test is an endless loop of T-Rex onscreen, and the Basemark OS test is an endless loop of the tests in Basemark OS until the battery dies.

In GFXBench, the difference between the two is effectively nothing. As seen below, performance ends up being the exact same as the Moto G. It’s quite clear that the Adreno 305 in both the Moto G and One mini 2 is gating performance in order to achieve high battery life.

In Basemark OS, the One mini 2 trails behind the Moto G, but as seen by the performance at the end of the run, it appears that the One mini 2 is simply throttling less during this test, which explains the delta in battery life.

Overall, while the One mini 2 has quite solid battery life, it's not quite as incredible as the Moto G's performance in some areas. I suspect that this may just be software, but it's unclear how much of it can be mitigated with future software updates. 

Charge Time

The One mini 2 ships with a 5W charger in the box. A full charge takes a little over two and a quarter hours. Note that unlike its big brother, the One mini 2 lacks support for Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 standard.

We typically plot power draw over the entire charge time in our smartphone/tablet reviews. Most of the time the graph looks like a flat line with a downward slope near the end of the charge cycle. The One mini 2 produced a graph that was a little less boring:

There are periodic drops in charge current, regardless of what charger I use (I tried both the One mini 2's in box charger as well as one from the M8). I don't think these drops will materially impact charge time, but I don't have a good explanation for them otherwise. HTC tells me that they are expected, but it didn't offer any additional explanation.