HTC HD Mini Review

27th July 2010

HTD HD Mini Review

The HTC HD mini, announced at Mobile World Congress 2010, aims to offer most of the HTC HD2’s functionality, but in a vastly smaller form factor. The HD mini equipped with 5 megapixel camera running on Windows Mobile 6.5.3 with HTC’s Sense UI running on top. Of course, the HD mini’s screen is smaller and its processor less powerful, but otherwise very little else appears to have changed. Read on to find out how the overall package rounds up.

The HTC HD mini is a fairly unassuming device, and takes on the standard black slate form that most touchscreen handsets conform to these days. To set it apart, HTC have left four chunky screws exposed at the rear, near the corners of the phone. This gives the HD mini a rugged, utilitarian look, that helps differentiate it from otherwise similar devices.

The touch sensitive keys beneath the display offer call send, home, Windows menu, back, and call end functions. Above the display is the HD mini’s earpiece grille, which also conceals an ambient light sensor and proximity sensor, with a notification LED in the screen surround just below it. Just above this, atop the phone, is the power button for sleeping and waking the device, or turning it on and off altogether. Also atop the phone is the HD mini’s 3.5mm headphone port. On the bottom of the phone is the micro-USB port for charging and data, the microphone pinhole, and a lanyard fixing point.

Adjusting the earpiece volume is taken care of via the volume rocker on the left edge of the handset. This can also be used for adjusting the ringer volume and system volume. There is nothing else along the left side of the handset, nor is there anything on the right side at all.

The contacts system on the HD mini is very good indeed, with countless fields to enter contact data. Users can store multiple phone numbers and email addresses, as well as postal addresses, birthdays, and anniversaries. Contact images can also be added, and contacts can be assigned their own ringtone, as well. The HD mini even features HTC’s contact-centric communication system, which filters all communication with a given contact down into their contact entry. From each contact entry you can view all SMS/MMS, emails, Facebook status updates and events, and call history between you and that contact. This makes it far easier to find any correspondence with a specific contact and shows the level of ingenuity that HTC are applying to their handsets.

Messaging is pretty well covered on the HTC HD mini, with SMS and MMS being organized into an attractive conversation view, and also being displayed in the HTC Sense ‘Messages’ pane. Email POP and IMAP accounts are also supported, as are Microsoft Exchange accounts. The HD mini can easily handle multiple email accounts, and groups them into the ‘Mail’ pane of HTC Sense, each with their own icon. HTC Sense displays email messages as pieces of paper, which can be swiped upwards and downwards to flick between them, or tapped upon to open them in full.

Instant messaging is supported on the HD mini, with Windows Live Messenger built in, and apps for most other services available online. Twitter is also featured on the HD mini and even has its own pane in the HTC Sense interface. The Twitter pane is a simple affair that allows you to read your Twitter feed and send new tweets, but HTC’s ‘Peep’ application offers a more in-depth Twitter experience. Within this app you can tab between all tweets, mentions, direct messages, and favorites, as well as search Twitter and follow new people. Overall, Twitter support on the HD mini is very good.

When it comes to data, the HTC HD mini is certainly a well-endowed little fellow. It features Wi-Fi, HSPA(INFO) 3G, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR(INFO) and A2DP(INFO), USB 2.0, and GPS. The Bluetooth connection can be used to transfer files between the HD mini and another phone or computer. Should you want to transfer things more quickly, the USB connection can also be used for this, and for syncing the handset with Outlook.

The HD mini is a quad-band GSM(INFO) device that supports the 850/900/1800/1900MHz GSM/EDGE bands. The HSPA (900/2100MHz) connection offers up to 7.2Mbps download speeds and up to 2Mbps upload speeds. During our testing we averaged around 1590kbps on the Vodafone network in the Bristol area of the UK, which is a pretty good result. A really neat feature of the HD mini is the ‘Wi-Fi Router’ function, which allows users to turn the phone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot. This basically uses the network data connection to provide Wi-Fi access for your laptop/iPod touch/iPad etc. Overall, it worked really well and offered surprisingly quick access, so we’d love to see it on more mobile phones in the future.

The HTC HD mini features a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, much like it’s bigger brother, the HD2. The main difference here is that the HD mini does not feature an LED flash like the HD2. This impacts low-light photography greatly, and means that the HD mini is really a camera only for the daytime. Night shots are very grainy and dark, with no night mode on offer to improve things. Shots in daylight were another story, and I was quite impressed with the results I achieved on a sunny day. Photos looked a little soft, giving them an oil painting quality, but colors were generally good and the touch-to-focus function of the camera allowed me to take some more arty shots.

The HD mini’s camera also shoots video at VGA resolution and 30fps, and saves them as MP4 files. The video quality is decent for phone video, but transferring it to a laptop or watching it on a TV reveals that it’s not quite as pretty as you might think. It’s fine for viewing on a phone, but don’t go selling your video camera just yet. The camera features numerous settings, such as white balance, brightness, ISO, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and effects, so that it can be tweaked for improved shots. There’s also a number of handy functions such as a self timer, geo-tagging, and a panorama mode. Once you’ve taken your photos you can delete them, flick through them in the gallery, upload them to Facebook, save them to the Footprints app, or send them via MMS or email.

The sound quality of the music player was very good, and users can even connect a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones, courtesy of the Bluetooth A2DP functionality. Music can be loaded up onto the microSD card via mass storage mode, or sync’ed with a PC via Microsoft Device Center 6.1 or Activesync 4.5. Oddly, mass storage mode didn’t seem to work with my Macbook Pro, but I could still load music onto the card via a card reader, then slot it into the handset. The HTC HD mini can also play video files in WMV, ASF, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, M4V, and AVI formats, and comes pre-loaded with a YouTube app for extra content.

If these apps don’t fulfill your needs, don’t worry, because there are plenty of apps online for Windows Mobile 6.5.3 that cover a multitude of different functions. Windows Mobile even has its own app store now, called Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as good as the Apple, Android, or Blackberry offerings, and more apps can be found on the internet than in the Marketplace. The HTC HD mini has just 512MB of internal storage, but can be expanded by up to 32GB with a microSD card.

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