Apple iPhone 5C or HTC One Mini - which is the better smartphone ?
For the first time ever Apple is releasing a second handset alongside its flagship. One that’s a little more affordable and aims to compete in a lower end of the market, however Apple isn’t the only big name phone maker doing that, as HTC had the same idea. So which is better, the iPhone 5C or the HTC One Mini?
The iPhone 5C has a surprisingly underwhelming build. Rather than metal it’s made of colourful plastic, though materials and colours aside it looks a lot like the iPhone 5S. At 124.4 x 59.2 x 8.97mm it’s fairly small and slim, though at 132g it’s not all that light for a phone of its size.
The HTC One Mini looks the far more premium of the two. The metal styling of the HTC One is largely intact, with an aluminium back and aluminium on the front above and below the screen. There’s a bit of plastic on display around the frame, but overall it’s a good looking phone. At 132 x 63.2 x 9.3mm it’s bigger all round than the iPhone 5C, but it also has a bigger screen and despite all that it’s still lighter at 122g. Overall the HTC One Mini definitely has better build quality than the iPhone 5C.
The iPhone 5C has a 4 inch 1136 x 640 widescreen Retina display with 326 pixels per inch- the same as the iPhone 5S. The HTC One Mini by comparison has a 4.3 inch 720 x 1280 Super LCD2 display with 342 pixels per inch. In other words while the display on the HTC One Mini is marginally bigger, both screens are ultimately of a similar size and quality.
The iPhone 5C has the same 1.3 GHz dual-core A6 processor as the iPhone 5, which should make it a very powerful device.
The HTC One Mini has a Snapdragon 400 1.4 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, which on paper makes it about as powerful as the iPhone 5C, but in practice its performance isn’t going to be as good, primarily because Android is much more of a system hog.
The iPhone 5C has an 8 megapixel camera with an LED flash. It can also shoot 1080p video at 30fps and has a secondary 1.2 megapixel camera. The HTC One Mini has the same 4 megapixel camera as the HTC One. It also has a secondary 1.6 megapixel camera and can shoot 1080p video at 30fps. It should be better at capturing low light shots than the iPhone 5C, but the iPhone 5C will be able to take higher resolution photos.
The iPhone 5C has a 1507 mAh battery while the HTC One Mini has an 1800 mAh battery. The iPhone 5C can manage up to 250 hours of standby time or up to 10 hours of talk time, while the HTC One Mini can manage a superior 692 hours of standby time or 13 hours and 20 minutes of talk time.
The iPhone 5C has a choice of 16 or 32GB of built in storage while the HTC One Mini comes with just 16GB and neither has a micro SD card slot.
Both the iPhone 5C and the HTC One Mini support Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G LTE, so there’s nothing to choose there.
Both the iPhone 5C and HTC One Mini are great handsets, but neither of them are the budget devices that their names might suggest, they’re simply slightly worse versions of each company’s flagship phone. They’re also fairly evenly matched, though they each have different strengths.
The HTC One Mini has a better build quality and longer battery life while the iPhone 5C is more powerful and has more potential storage. Both phones have decent cameras but each has a different speciality, with the HTC One Mini handling low light images well, while the iPhone 5C’s camera can take higher resolution pictures. Then of course the HTC One Mini runs Android 4.2.2 while the iPhone 5C runs iOS 7.
Given how close each of these is priced to its big brother, it’s questionable how good value either of them actually are, but there’s no clear winner between the two, it all depends on what you want from your phone.
