OPPO N1 Mini

In the popular sci-fi movie 'Honey, I shrunk the Kids', the kids were shrunk by an electromagnetic shrink ray. It seems that Oppo has used the same on the Oppo N1 to produce its mini variant. The Oppo N1 Mini is exactly the same as the Oppo N1 right down to the T, except of course the size. However, you can also say that the ray was applied for a very short duration, since the N1 Mini isn't as compact as you'd expect from its moniker. It's small only when compared to the large phablet-sized display (5.9-inches) on its brother, but with a 5-inch display it's even comparable to many flagships such as the likes of HTC One (M8) (review) and Samsung Galaxy S5 (review | FAQs).

As mentioned, the N1 Mini sports a 5-inch display. Even though it only features HD resolution, we found it sharp and vibrant enough for reading text, browsing web pages and watching movies. However, it’s reflective at times, especially under direct sunlight. The viewing angles are also good making it easier for you and your friends to view a video or browse through pictures together.

It seems that all the Chinese smartphone vendors have a common dislike for stock Android’s interface since almost all of them customise it. Oppo also falls in this category and named its customisation effort as ColorOS. The N1 Mini runs on Color OS v1.4, which is based on more than a year old Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. The brand promises to bring an update soon, but that might be too late since by then Android’s next version codenamed as L might already be out.

It’s the camera department where the Oppo N1 Mini justifies why it deserves to be called the mini version of the N1, since it hardly shares any other specs with the latter. The N1 Mini comes with a 206-degree rotatable camera, sharing the exact same 13-megapixel sensor with its bigger sibling.

For handling the hardware side of things, the N1 Mini is equipped with a Snapdragon 400 SoC having four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.6GHz. The SoC also offers Adreno 305 GPU which takes care of graphics. The setup is decidedly mid-range and the performance displayed by the smartphone is evident from that. It works well for the most part with no signs of lag while navigating the home screens, watching a video in 1080p resolution or even playing casual games like Subway Surfers. However, when it comes to graphics-heavy games like Riptide GP2, we ran into lags at times. The device also heats up after playing for 15 to 20 minutes continuously.

The N1 Mini is supplied with a 2,140mAh Li-ion battery. While the battery capacity isn't too low, the real-life usage isn't too great, as the phone hardly lasts a day even with basic usage. Use the device for playing games, accessing websites via cellular data or navigation via GPS and the battery drops even faster. In our test that involves playing a 720p video on the smartphone on loop, it lasted 7.5 hours, which is just about average.