The flagship smartphone from HTC, the One (M8) was released earlier this year and it was received with great reviews. The compact version of the HTC One (M8) dubbed as the 'HTC One Mini 2' is official now and it is boasting of a design that will give stiff competition to the top-ranked premium phones ruling the market.

The smaller HTC One Mini 2 is quite identical to HTC One M8 in many ways but there are some major differences as well. Here is a review of the latest HTC One Mini 2.

Design

The company HTC is known for making premium-looking phones. The body of One Mini 2 is made of brushed metal with a slightly curved back panel. The display comes with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection.

The handset comes with a 4.5 inches Super LCD2 capacitive touchscreen, which bundles 720 x 1,280 pixels resolution and 326 ppi of pixel density. The handset weighs only 137 g; however, the phone is 0.42 inches thick. Even then, it is easy to hold in one hand, the thickness of this compact version is comparatively higher than all the flagship phones released this year. In addition, the Mini 2 has commendable viewing angles and incredible color reproduction.

As IBTimes UK points out, the phone looks taller, in order to house HTC's BoomSound speakers.

Hardware, Software and Storage

The HTC One Mini 2 is powered by a quad-core Cortex-A7 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 400) processor clocked at 1.2 GHz and a 1 GB of RAM. This handset runs on HTC Sense 6.0 UI on top of Google's Android 4.4.2 (KitKat). The internal storage capacity of this handset is 16 GB. In addition, the Mini 2 supports microSD card slot for further expansion up to 128 GB.

The phone's user interface now has BlinkFeed; it is HTC's newsfeed which collates content from various social networks and selected web sites. Blinkfeed now gives the ability to the user to create custom feeds.

Camera

HTC is the pioneer in introducing the Duo Camera concept with their flagship the HTC One M8. But the latest compact version One Mini 2 does not house this Duo Camera feature.

Nevertheless, HTC compensates this deficit by increasing the megapixel count. The phone sports a good 13 megapixel sensor with LED flash. The phone is capable of recording Full HD videos. Other camera features include autofocus, geo tagging, face and smile detection. In addition, the handset houses a 5 megapixel front facing camera.

Battery

The HTC One Mini 2 comes with a non-removable Li-Po 2110 mAh battery unit. That is expected to provide 16 hours of 3G talk-time and 556 hours of 3G stand-by time.

Color

The HTC One Mini 2 comes in three shades gunmetal gray, glacial silver and amber gold.

Connectivity

The handset supports NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Wi-Fi hotspot.

Price and Release Date

The HTC One Mini 2 will be priced at £360 to £370 (roughly around AU$650) outright. There is no official release date for Australia at this point in time.