Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini

Product Information

This screen is bright, colourful and has the vividness that Super AMOLED offers. Samsung is king of Super AMOLED and matches software to hardware with shortcut icons, wallpapers and app choices that all make the most of the colour saturation the tech excels at. Even if this means the results are sometimes eye-searingly colourful. Note that the camera on the S5 is capable of 4K recording but that's not the case here. Still, the 1080p video looks pretty good, too. Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini: Performance

Above the display lies the earpiece, the ambient light sensor, the proximity sensor and the 2.1MP front-facing camera. Also to the left of the earpiece lies the LED notification light, which is normally invisible - it blinks only for notifications. But there is also a higher rating, eight, which means your phone will survive in water under pressure for long periods. The Sony Xperia Z2, for instance, reaches this waterproof level.

On top of that, Samsung's got the S5 Mini loaded up with all the connectivity features you'd expect from a modern Android phone — quad-band HSPA and support for the main European LTE bands, along with Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wifi support. All of that functions as expected, and the GS5 Mini's LTE reception was comparable to that of other current Android phones. The retail box of the Samsung Galaxy S5 mini is about the size of the phone it has within. Underneath the Galaxy S5 mini lie headphones, a microUSB cable and an A/C adapter. Several leaflets complete the retail box. The Galaxy S5 Mini comes with Android 4.4.2 KitKat and Samsung's TouchWiz software which includes almost all of the features of the S5. Okay, so it's not a full HD screen on the Mini, but the 720p display is still impressive. Since itís a 4.5-inch screen the need for 1080p isn't as great as on bigger models - though the HTC One (M7) has a 4.7-inch 1080p screen and looks amazing. The 720 x 1280 resolution gives a pixels per inch count of 326, the same as the iPhone's Retina display, so no wonder it looks great. Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini: Camera

The S5 Mini wasn’t able to run Epic Citadel at our usual Ultra High Quality setting either, so we had to settle for running our benchmarks on High Quality instead. On this setting, it managed a very smooth average of 53.7fps. This is promising for anyone who likes playing more demanding games on the move, but graphical fidelity was disappointing. The GS5 Mini model we're reviewing has 16GB of onboard storage, of which an ample 11.8GB is available to use. Samsung also provides a microSD slot, naturally, which works with cards up to 128GB. But despite the hardware and software limitations, the GS5 Mini's rear camera generally takes good-looking shots — better than the HTC One Mini 2's 13-megapixel camera, at any rate. Most of the time you'll get pleasing shots without any of the aberrations associated with low-quality smartphone sensors: visible noise, mushy over-processed images, artefacting or washed-out color. On the whole, particularly in daylight, the Mini captures decent-looking photos with a plenty of fine detail. Look up close and you'll see evidence of software sharpening, but even that's not too obnoxious. There's a trend, now that phones have tended to the hefty, that manufacturers follow their flagship blowers with smaller versions that will suit smaller hands. When they launch them the makers say, actually always say, that they have not cut any corners with their new, diddier device.

This is a well-designed, powerfully specced phone that will suit all sizes of hands from the smallest to the most sausage-fingered - though the latter will need to type carefully. The device is claimed to be water resistant despite the exposed USB charging port, while the USB charging port of the Galaxy S5 requires to be covered by a flap to ensure water protection.

No, is the short answer. As you’ll see from Katherine’s original review below, the S5 Mini was significantly less powerful than the phone it was based on. Nearly three generations of phone later, that gap is more insurmountable now than it ever was. The Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini is an Android smartphone developed by Samsung Electronics. It was announced in May 2014 and released on July 1, 2014. The S5 Mini is a mid-range model of its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone and a successor to the Galaxy S4 Mini. It competes with the HTC One Mini 2 and the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. It has a similar design and software features to its high-end counterpart, the Galaxy S5. [4] [5] Specifications [ edit ] But usually they have. So is Samsung's story any different with its new Galaxy S5 Mini? Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini: Size and build

Samsung Galaxy S5 mini Duos

The S5 Mini only has a 4.5in screen and a 1,280×720 resolution, but its Super AMOLED display is just as lovely to look at as the S5’s. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying an outstanding 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, so you can expect colours to look their very best when watching films and videos. Inside, the S5 Mini takes a more radical departure from the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy S5 we got in the UK. That handset used a2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 chipset, while the Mini uses one of Samsung’s own quad-core 1.4GHz Exynos 3470 processors instead. While the Exynos 3470 is perfectly fast enough to run Android 4.4.2 and Samsung’s customised TouchWiz interface, the phone’s web browsing performance was much slower than we were expecting.