The Samsung Galaxy S3 mini is a device that will never land in India. The souped up brother of the Galaxy S Duos is currently retailing in Europe and you might have seen our unboxing recently. In a build up to the review, we took the device outdoors for some pics for the same, and hence presenting you, the Samsung Galaxy S3 mini photo gallery.
As we said earlier, the device is considered small by today’s standards, especially with a 4 inch WVGA screen. But good thing is that, like the Galaxy S, this too sports a Super AMOLED screen, with great vibrant colours, yet the pentile subpixel arrangement dampens our spirit, a little bit.
The display has infinite contrast being a Super AMOLED panel, and like you usually expect from a Samsung device, the display is great for watching videos.
The front face of the phone has the ear piece, a VGA front facing camera and a couple of sensors above the display. Those two are the ambient light sensor and the proximity sensor respectively.
On the bottom of the face you can see the physical home button that’s a standard on all global Samsung Galaxy phones, and two backlit capacitive keys which might be hard to see in the above photo but they are – the back button on the right and the options button on the left.
On the top you have a 3.5mm heaphone jack and a small slit opening used for taking off the battery door.
On the bottom, you have a micro USB slot, however it doesn’t do double duty as a HDMI out, owing to the lack of MHL support.
The right side of the phone has the power/lock switch. The design echoes the S3 to the minutest detail. Even the small texture on the silver coloured part is exactly like the S3.
On the left hand side, you have the volume rocker of the device. For us, being used to the volume rocker on the right side, this was a bit weird.
The back of this phone is made of thin and unbreakable plastic. There is a 5 megapixel camera on the back capable of recording videos at 720p. In our experience, the camera produced some good macro pictures, but the colours were a bit washed out. For a phone at this price, we might be asking too much from it, but that’s set aside for the full review in which we will discuss it in detail.
There is a loudspeaker besides the camera unit and underneath it is a single LED flash and the Samsung logo. We found that the back is a bit slippery to hold.
When you open the back, you can find the battery, which is rated at 1500 mAH. Above the battery is the full size SIM card slot in which we have managed to slide inside a micro SIM card.
Underneath the battery, you can find the micro SD card slot in which we have installed a test 16GB card.
The device runs on Android 4.1.2 JellyBean. That’s the image of the phone showing the about page above. It also has the custom TouchWiz layer on top, which was described as Nature UX at the launch of the S3. One thing we miss on the S3 mini is the ripple effect lock screen which is not available as an option. With that said, we do have a lot more to say on our full review, so before that, if you have any questions, do let us know in the comments section below and stay tuned for the review in the coming days.