In a surprisingly early fashion, HTC has officially announced the HTC One mini 2. As expected, it brings the design and styling of HTC’s latest flagship to a lower price point, while making a couple of (read: quite a few) sacrifices on the hardware side of things to place it squarely in the mid-range bracket.
The One mini 2 comes with an aluminium back, but adds a little bit of plastic on the sides to bring down costs. It has a 4.5-inch display of 720p resolution, which is a tad larger than the original One mini. Under the hood, there’s a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor accompanied by 1GB of RAM, an NFC chip, 16GB of storage that’s expandable via a microSD card slot, and a 2,100 mAh battery that is expected to offer battery life similar to the HTC One M8.
The UltraPixel camera has been replaced by a standard 13-megapixel sensor, though you’ll still be able to take great selfies thanks to a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, similar to the M8. It shares other great features with its flagship counterpart – there are stereo BoomSound speakers on the front, and you get Android 4.4 KitKat with HTC’s Sense 6 UI, which includes features such as BlinkFeed and Zoe.
The HTC One mini 2 will be available in the same colors as the M8 – Gunmetal Grey, Glacial Silver and Rose Gold – and will go on sale in Europe, the Middle East and Africa by the end of May, and in North Asia in early June. Pricing hasn’t been revealed, but we can expect it to cost considerably higher than HTC’s other mid-range devices, like the Desire 816.
