Four-inch screen will provide an interesting challenge to the iPhone 5.
As expected, Samsung today officially announced the Galaxy S3 Mini that features a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 1GHz dual-core CPU, and NFC.
The 111.5-gram handset, which runs on Android 4.1, packs a 1,500mAh battery, 1GB RAM, and 8 or 16GB of internal storage, in addition to a maximum of 32GB storage via microSD.
As for the 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, the display comes with a WVGA resolution, with the main five-megapixel camera capable of 720p video. Also included is a VGA front-facing camera. Radio features are 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, GPS, GLONASS, FM radio and Bluetooth 4.0 (LE). NFC is also featured, but the Mini will only support HSPA 900/1900/2100 networks, as well as EDGE 850/900/1800/1900.
The Galaxy S3 Mini also understands users' gestures via Smart Stay; the device's camera tracks one's eyes and keeps the screen on as long as you're looking at it. Elsewhere, upon reading a text message from a friend, Direct Call allows users to automatically dial that contact by lifting the handset to your ear. Smart Alert, meanwhile, tells users if they've missed calls or messages when they picked up the phone.
Unfortunately, Samsung did not reveal a release date nor did they confirm the device's price. What we do know in terms of its launch, though, is that the mini will arrive in Europe.
Screen is one of the most important parts of the phone (and AMOLED still didn't get due credit, I guess because Apple still doesn't have it) barely, if at all, covered in benchmarks and overall look and feel is not at all.
Specs are there so that sites like toms have something to work on. They are mostly meaningless.
Hopefully they will have a removable battery so people if they wish can get larger size batteries for it. Lets hope they dont case it in coke-can aluminum a la iCrap.
Normally screens consume most of the battery power so smaller battery with smaller screen makes perfect sense.