Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini review

We’ve got Samsung to thank for the miniaturisation craze. It started with the Galaxy S3 and its cut-down S3 Mini, so it wasn’t at all surprising when Samsung announced it would also be shrinking the Galaxy S4.

However, just like the S4, the S4 Mini is now pretty old news as far as miniature smartphones go. You can still buy one for around £160, but these days you can get a much better smartphone than the S4 for the same price.

The Moto G4 would be our top choice, but that’s also got a large 5.5in display, so it’s not exactly a great fit for those after something smaller. Instead, I’d recommend the Samsung Galaxy J5, which has a 5in screen. That’s still a lot bigger than the 4.3in S4 Mini, but nowadays you’d be hard-pushed to find anything smaller.

However, if you’re really desperate for a tiny Android phone, then by all means read on and see what our original S4 Mini review said about this teeny handset.

First impressions are reasonable. The Galaxy S4 Mini looks like a small Galaxy S4, with its squared-off top and rounder bottom edge. It’s not a particularly exciting design, but it’s certainly comfortable to hold for a long phone call. The phone is all plastic, but it’s fairly soft-touch and feels tough. However, the HTC One Mini’s silver and white chassis is certainly smarter and more interesting to look at, and we love the HTC’s metal rear.

Like the One Mini, the Galaxy S4 Mini has a 4.3in display, but instead of 1,280×720 pixels, you only get 960×540. The difference is immediately obvious when you put the two phones side by side. While it’s easy to read web pages when fully zoomed out on the HTC One Mini, the S4 Mini’s lower resolution makes this much more of a struggle.

We can’t argue with the S4 Mini’s vibrant colours and wide viewing angles, which we’ve come to expect from AMOLED displays, but we’re not convinced by its colour accuracy. Large areas of white on the HTC One Mini’s screen were pure and white, but on the S4 Mini they have a blue tinge. The S4 Mini’s screen also has a slight grainy texture, and feels rougher to the touch than the super-smooth HTC display.

We’re not particularly enamoured by the AMOLED screen, but it does give the S4 Mini fantastic battery life

The low-power AMOLED screen helps give the S4 Mini one big advantage, though; it has seriously impressive battery life. In our video playback test, which involves playing a video file on loop, the S4 Mini lasted an amazing 13h 3m. That’s one of the best scores we have ever seen, and four and a half hours more than the LCD display-equipped HTC One Mini. This is definitely a phone with all-day life, even if you’re a heavy user.

When it comes to performance, too, the Galaxy S4 Mini pulls ahead of HTC’s handset. Its dual-core processor may have half the cores of the full-size Galaxy S4 and indeed most high-end smartphones, but those cores run at a very quick 1.7GHz. This showed in the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, where the S4 Mini completed the test in just 1,008ms – even quicker than the Galaxy S4’s 1,100ms. The S4 Mini couldn’t keep up with the full-size S4 in the 3DMark graphics benchmark, but a score of 5,549 is still up there with moderately powerful phones such as the HTC One X+ and Samsung Galaxy Mega, and is around 700 points more than the HTC One Mini managed in the same benchmark. We found 3D games such as Beach Buggy Blitz ran smoothly enough.

However, in normal use we felt the HTC One Mini had the edge for smoothness when scrolling through the app tray, and especially when browsing web pages. Despite its impressive JavaScript benchmark result, when browsing complicated web pages such as the Guardian news website with comments turned on, the S4 Mini’s default browser would often stutter when scrolling. Things improved when we switched to Chrome, but the HTC One Mini still seemed to have the edge for web browsing slickness.

This could be down to HTC’s custom Android software simply performing better than Samsung’s, but here is where the S4 Mini has an advantage; its operating system is much closer to Android stock. For many people, HTC’s Sense customisations are just too much, especially now the default HTC homescreen is a news feed rather than full of apps and widgets. Samsung’s colourful skin sticks reasonably closely to the standard Android format, with five homescreens for widgets and favourite apps, and an app tray for the rest, again divided into apps and widgets. We’re particular fans of Samsung’s keyboard, whose clearly-spaced keys make it easy to type quickly, and the fact there’s a brightness control on the notification bar.

Unfortunately, the S4 Mini’s camera app loses some of the features from the full-size S4. There’s now no Dual Shot mode, for example, which on the Galaxy S4 lets you superimpose a picture from the front camera on a shot taken with the rear camera, so showing the facial expression of the photographer at the point the shot was taken. Considering this is just done in software, we think taking it out is a bit mean.

A bit of overexposure, but not so much as from the HTC One Mini’s camera

In terms of image quality, the S4 Mini’s camera is reasonable. Our daylight test shots showed a fair level of detail and reasonable colour accuracy, but shots in bright light were overexposed, leading to the sky bleaching out on a brightly-lit day. The overexposure was nowhere near as bad as that we saw from the HTC One Mini’s shots, though. The S4 Mini couldn’t match the One Mini for low-light image quality, as it struggled to focus and produced shots swimming with noise.

But the sensor struggles in low light

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini is currently updated to Android 4.4.2 KitKat. An update to Android 5.0 Lollipop looks to be beyond it unfortunately with a planned update being cancelled. Reported by YouMobile.org, UK mobile network 3 had announced an update before it was withdrawn, apparently due to memory limitations on the handset

You can now pick up a SIM free handset for £150, which well under half what we reviewed it for originally. That puts it in the same area as the current Motorola Moto G 2nd Gen. That handset has a bigger screen, with a higher-resolution, 1,280×720 display and a similar Snapdragon chipset. That handset has already got an update to Android 5.0 Lollipop and so is a better all-round choice than the ageing S4 Mini. That said, the Moto G itself may well be about to get a replacement, so it’s worth holding off a while if you can.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini was a perfectly competent mid-range smartphone, and its excellent battery life is still impressive . However, even at a new, much lower price, it’s still outgunned by newer budget handsets.

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