The HTC Mini+ is a little Bluetooth handset that pairs with your smartphone. Right now it only works with HTC devices that come rocking Boomsound speakers, i.e. the HTC One, One Mini and One Max.
The idea behind the Mini+ in making and receiving phone calls easier thanks to its slimmed-down size. As such it’s more likely to see adoption by One Max customers, thanks to that phablet’s borderline prohibitive size.
Design
The Mini+ looks like what you’d have expected the phone market to have produced in a world without smartphones. It’s super-thin, very narrow and incredibly light. It sports a small 1.5-inch monochrome display, under which sits a familiar alpha-numeric keypad.
The front panel is a beautiful brushed metal plate. The back is just made of plastic, which doesn’t look too great but is necessary to keep the surprising lightweight design from becoming too noticeable.
User experience
The display may at first seem a draw-back. It’s heavily-pixelated, non-touch, small, and monochrome. In actuality, it’s as good as it needs to be. The lack of display quality means that the battery can last over two (but not quite three) days.
So it’s easy to read and energy efficient. Perfect.
The menu screens are pretty simple to navigate around, especially if you’ve ever used an old alpha-numeric handset. The power/hang-up button also carries the ‘back’ function while the central large button is Enter. You lock it by holding down hash.
Going back to the old feature phone system will sound like hell to some people, but you’d only be doing it for phone calls and some other features like the Power-Point function and TV remote app. For general use like media and browsing you’ll still be using the main handset.
Probably the biggest hole in the Mini+’s user experience is the lack of texting. You can send a handful of pre-composed texts like “Where are you?” etc, but you can’t write your own custom SMSes.
Despite not supporting custom texts, HTC included the old T9, three-letters-per-number system on the keypad. These letters are there to assist dialling.
HTC’s quick-contact feature lets you start spelling out a person’s name using numbers and it’ll cull your list accordingly. This makes calling from the Mini+ much easier than it otherwise would be. Still, it’d be such a more useful device if you could jot down a quick SMS or two.
Who would use this?
The Mini+ is a well-made little unit, but it’s obvious that it’s not going to be a market-buster. It’s really only going to be useful for someone with a cumbersomely large device, like the One Max, who makes and takes a lot of phone calls every day.
Add to that the 10(ish) metre range of the Mini+’s Bluetooth connection and you have device that goes great with a phone that’s nearby but not necessarily on-hand, such as in a satchel or briefcase.
We see it as being aimed pretty steadily at business users. Not too many general smartphone owners make too many phone calls; they send texts. Business types on the other hand need to pull their phone out dozens of times a day for calls. On something like the One Max that’s going to be a problem: a problem that the Mini+ solves perfectly.
Alex Angove-Plumb
Digital Content Editor
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