The Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini, Announced
on July 1, 2014 and is currently available in Europe, New Zealand and Latin
America. The S5 Mini is a mid-range model of its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone and a
successor to the Galaxy S4 Mini. It competes with the HTC One Mini 2 and the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. The S5 Mini is the first mid-range smartphone to
include Envelope Tracking to improve Power Amplifier efficiency thereby
decreasing heat and increasing battery life. It
has a similar design and software features to its high-end counterpart.
The S5 Mini uses an almost identical variant of the Galaxy S5's
polycarbonate perforated faux-leather hardware design. Internally, it features
a quad-core 1.4 GHz Exynos 3 Quad 3470 processor with 1.5 GB of RAM,
16 GB of expandable storage, and a 4.5 inch (1280x720 pixel) HD Super AMOLED screen with a pixel density of 326 PPI. The S5 Mini also
includes a 2.1-megapixel (MP) front-facing camera, and an
8-megapixel rear-facing camera.
Below the screen are three buttons.
The physical "Home" button in the centre contains a swipe-based fingerprint reader.
The "Recent apps" and "Back" buttons are capacitive. In
accordance with Android 4.0 human interface guidelines, the S5 mini no longer
uses a "Menu" key like its predecessors, although its button layout
is still reversed in comparison to other Android devices with the S5 mini's
button layout (such as the HTC One X and Galaxy Nexus, whose "Back" buttons
are to the left of "Home").
Similarly to the S5, the S5 Mini
comes with Android 4.4.2 Kitkat and Samsung's TouchWiz software
which includes almost all of the features of the S5.
The S5 Mini contains a 2100 mAh,
NFC-enabled battery. Its software like the S5, also contains an "Ultra
Power Saving" mode to further extend battery life; when enabled, all
non-essential processes are disabled, and the screen switches to only rendering
in white on black. Additional power efficiency features include R2
Semiconductor Envelope Tracking technology which dynamically adjusts
the Power Amplifier voltage to improve efficiency thereby reducing heat and
extending battery life.
