I’ll be honest here and try to level with you. I almost burst laughing when I saw this little creation around the Internet. The HTC Mini, as the Taiwanese manufacturer has chosen to call it, is basically a phone for your phone ( how positively BRILLIANT is that? ). What the HTC Mini was made for is to better operate the HTC Butterfly. This is a nifty little device which sort of looks like your old wall-mounted phone, except it’s so much thinner.
The HTC Mini is already available for sale in the Chinese market and it is offered for sale alongside the flagship HTC Butterfly. It works through NFC, so basically in order to connect it to the phone you have to keep them glued to one another for a couple of seconds. However, my mind is struggling to understand what sort of drug the people that made it were on when they created this? Does it not diminish the point of Mobile if you’re getting a remote control for it? And in the end, you’ll end up carrying 2 phones with you simply because you’re too lazy to pull the big HTC Butterfly out of your pocket. Obviously this is either too complex for me to understand why it was created, or too dumb for my mind to comprehend, yet I suspect the latter.
The HTC Mini otherwise works as a regular phone ( which is connected for some unholy reason to another phone ) and it can display messages, make calls and access calendar entries ( sort of like a non-smartphone does ). What makes this thing actually a bit worth its price ( hardly worth it, in my personal opinion – but then again, I tend to over-think things ) is that it can be used as a remote control for the phone when it’s connected via HDMI to the TV. However, a cheaper approach would have been to just get a longer HDMI cable and keep the phone in your hands while using the HDMI ( again, I may be wrong, but it’s highly unlikely ). The other “unique” thing this remote can do is control the shutter cameras of the phone. Also, the manufacturers brag that it has a FIND MY PHONE feature, in case you lose it. Again, this is something I could have found a simpler solution for: just call it from another number and see where it rings. Also, how easy is it to lose a massive 5.0 inch screen that you’d actually need a FIND MY PHONE function?
There is no news of the pricing of the HTC Mini at the moment, or whether or not it will be available worldwide. Personally, I find no real use for it. Has the world gone so mad that we want to create Bluetooth and NFC-Enabled dumbphones that we connect to our smartphones simply to feel like the good old days? Has HTC gone so mad due to their low revenues that they actually think this is a good idea? Just between you and me, the world has gone mad beyond repair. Heck, this device is sort of like HTC saying “Our phone is too big – use this other phone instead”. If this becomes a real product and people will start buying it, I will come to terms with the idea that I am getting to old for this ( although how that’s possible at 20 is sort of impossible – but then so was the concept of creating a remote-control for your phone ).
In case you want a demonstration of this unnecessary abomination, there is a video below. If you don’t speak the language, however, you won’t really understand all that much.
