Review: Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini
Here’s the second of four phone reviews in a single week.
If you were interested in a Samsung Galaxy phone, but you were not thrilled with the size of the SIII or SIV phones, you’ve got a new option. The Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini provided to me by Telus is a phone that has all the features of the SIII in a smaller package. It feels good in your hands and is easy to put in your pocket. The screen is bright and vibrant just like the S3. Though it is not as high a resolution as the SIII. It seems to be resistant to fingerprints on the case and when it comes to the screen it does attract fingerprints. But when the screen is on you don’t see them which is a nice touch. It feels solid and has the bonus of having a removable battery as well as the ability to have a microSD card in it as well. It comes with 16 GB of memory and it can be expanded to 64GB of memory.
The SIII Mini has a 1.5 GHz dual core processor which is decent when compared to the full sized SIII. But that helps with battery life as it lasted me about a day when I used it as my daily phone checking e-mail and the like. As for connectivity, it’s got NFC, WiFi as well as LTE connectivity. The latter was FAST as I was able to get 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream via Speedtest.net. That’s pretty quick. In terms of apps, it comes with a decent amount. There are the standard Google applications, such as Google+, GTalk, Gmail, various Play apps and the Android Voice search and recorder. Samsung as usual has put its own toys in, such as the Game Hub, Video Hub, ChatON, Samsung Hub, S Planner, S Suggest and S Voice. And of course it comes with Google Maps which does pretty good voice navigation and it speaks street names. Overall, it’s a good bundle of software
Now when it comes to the camera, it has a 8 MP rear camera with LED Flash, and 1.9 MP front-facing camera. The rear camera is pretty good as you can see from this picture taken at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Click the picture to see it at full size:
It also does 720P video as well as evidenced by this video. Set it to full screen and to 720P to see it as it was recorded:
The video quality is very good and you can hear everything. The insects, the plane, and the guy beside me who thought the plane was “awesome.”
What’s the bottom line? If you want a Galaxy smartphone but you want a smaller size, the Galaxy SIII Mini is a great phone. You don’t give up anything by getting this phone which is good. It may not be the cutting edge Galaxy S4, but it is plenty capable and anyone who buys it will be happy with it. It’s $0 at Telus on a 2 year plan or $650 outright. That’s a great deal either way. Check it out if you want a small, easy to handle smartphone.
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