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Samsung S4 Mini review pt2 (picture heavy)

aldaweb
Level 26: Upbeat
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Registered:
‎11-12-2013 22:43
‎11-12-2013 22:43

Part 1 here

 

To give a fair assessment for a weeks primary device use I reset the phone, swapped to my 4G O2 SIM and logged into my main Gmail account. This pulled in all my contacts, calendar and my apps from the Play Store along with wifi history and other settings that had been backed up to Google all seamlessly. I just had to setup my non Gmail accounts.

 

Touchwiz offers a choice of home screen modes according to how experienced you are with a smartphone., Normal and easy.

Easy mode offers 3 basic screens which are even more basic than on my Note2 

Screenshot_2013-12-10-19-44-31.png Screenshot_2013-12-10-19-42-59.png Screenshot_2013-12-10-19-44-35.png

 

Whereas the Normal mode has 5 screens 3 of which below

 

Screenshot_2013-11-23-15-42-00.png Screenshot_2013-11-23-15-44-12.png Screenshot_2013-12-10-19-42-17.png

 

I opted for the latter. Being a Blackberry user I also installed BBM and associated my Blackberry ID, which transferred BBM contacts over, but disables BBM on the Z10. BBM features are similar to the iPhone with no voice or video capabilities but seemed to work well.

 

 The screen of the S4 Mini is 0.1 inches larger than the Z10 yet the overall size is slightly smaller and as previously described has a more curved back making it sit comfortably in the hand. 

S4 Mini v Z10.jpg

 

But how does it fare in everyday use? Emails were picked up from all the accounts I set up, but though there is a unified inbox, Gmail is separated from the other emails in it's own app. Being used to the Blackberry hub I found this a little annoying. Also out of the box predictive text is turned off which is just a toggle in settings but would be better on by default.
The lack of a notification light meant that if you missed the audible notification you could easily miss an important message.
Text messaging and BBM are both separate apps meaning for several notifications received at the same time you could be switching between apps to access them all. One up for Blackberry here. :wink:

 

The 4G signal was picked up well where available and the ususal choice of Stock browser or Chrome both performed well as would be expected.

Battery Life in everyday isage was shorter than occasional use as would be expected but it stillmanaged a two full working days from a full charge.

....

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