The phone is designed with one-handed use in mind, with a sleek, comfortable-in-your-hand build that unfortunately precludes being able to swap the battery.
That said, the battery that comes with it lasted reasonably well for me. It boasts about 13.7 hours talk time and 692 hours on standby, which sounds like what my experience with it was. It needed charging once or twice, but I have seen worse.
Maybe it is because I work in news, but I found the Blink Feed service on the front page extremely useful.
The big weakness of the phone is the camera lacks image stabilisation.
This is odd given that the reasoning for using a four megapixel sensor on it is to give you better quality shots in low light conditions.
So if you are indoors and taking a shot one handed, well hopefully you didn't drink too much of that beer in your other hand.
HTC Zoe is supposed to help you find the best frame in a shot, but really you need that image stabilisation.
This didn't affect me much because I prefer using full cameras to take photos anyway, but it might be something to consider if you are into smartphone photography.
The interface is clean and quick to use, and it was fairly easy to set up on my home network.
Most importantly however, I found it extremely useable as a phone. I didn't find myself face-dialling anyone, and I also found that when I did want to phone people the number pad was nice and reactive.
I believe that if a piece of technology relies on a touch screen interface as its method of input, that interface dictates your full experience with it. I found the HTC One Mini's touch screen worked brilliantly.
The HTC One Mini delivers on its promises of good sound, and it wasn't anywhere near as tinny as a lot of others on the market.
With this being an Android phone, there are a variety of apps out there, and it has the muscle to run most of them with its dual-core 1.4ghz processor and 1 gig of DDR Ram.
Unforunately MTN users will have to wait until the first quarter of 2014 in order to get one on their contracts - though Cell C and Vodacom have them available right now.
At R5 500 the HTC One Mini delivers extremely well, and is one of the best phones I have used this year.
You can get the full specs on HTC's website.
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