iPhone 12 Mini: My Honest Review 2 Months Later! By Mark Spurrell

A small portion of this video is sponsored by skill share, hey guys, mark here, and today I want to talk about the iPhone 12 mini I've been using this phone for about two months now and spoiler alert. I like this phone so much that I'd call it my favorite iPhone ever made, and it's not even close, and I'm not the only one either. Other tech reviewers, like Quinn from snazzy labs, john Morrison and Austin Evans, have talked about how much they love the 12 mini over and over again look the 12 mini is a fantastic phone, but I think the reason why we as teach reviewers, love this phone. So much has a lot more to do with its tiny size than anything else. Let me explain, as I'm sure you've noticed, phones have been slowly getting bigger and bigger and bigger over the years. This is one of the first iPhones.

Well, actually it's one of the first iPod touches, but the screen size and dimensions are nearly identical in 2007 and 2008. Phones of this size would have been the norm, but put it next to something like the iPhone 12 Pro, and it looks like a toy. This is a graph of the average phone screen size over time before 2010, the average screen size was below 3 inches, but by 2015 sizes were approaching 5 inches and by 2019 we were hitting 6 inches. Obviously this graph has to plateau at some point as the size can't keep getting much bigger without becoming extremely inconvenient human hands only get so big after all. But my point here is that we've gotten so used to these huge phones lately that when a tiny phone comes along, that has very few compromises.

It's refreshing, exciting, even Quinn tweeted recently that the 12 pro max feels ginormous after using the 12 mini and that the 12 mini just feels like the right size now and that's exactly how I feel about using this phone for a couple of months. Yes, initially, the 5.4 inch display felt a little small and I had to get used to using a small keyboard again, but I love the size of the 12 mini. It just feels right. Thankfully, apple decided to use OLED display tech in that 5.4-inch screen, and it looks great. It's definitely on the small side for watching movies or TV shows, but it's a full 1080p display and for casually watching YouTube videos in your spare time.

It's excellent. The new industrial squared off design with rounded bezels makes it feel very modern, and it's very enjoyable to hold, especially since it has a weight of 133 grams. I cannot overstate just how comfortable this phone is to use picking up a phone like the 12 pro not only feels huge now, but it also feels heavy at 187 grams. Like I said, the iPhone 12 mini has very few compromises. I'm not going to go in depth on the specific tech specs of this phone, because I've already covered that ad nauseam in my full review.

But I do want to talk more about how this phone feels to use and the potential compromises you may run into. If you decide to buy this phone, as you would expect from a brand new iPhone performance is top-notch. I've had no real performance issues to speak of minus the odd iOS bug here and there, and although gaming on a smaller screen like this isn't ideal, it does perform very well graphically that performance does come at a cost, though, if you push this phone with a lot of gaming or a lot of photo or video recording, the battery will take a hit. That's the biggest compromise you're going to run into if you own, the 12 mini if you're just browsing social media, you're, watching videos or calling and texting you'll get some solid battery life out of this phone. That's the beauty of the a14 bionic inside it has two high performance cores and four high efficiency cores, meaning that it has power when you need it, and it can conserve power when you don't people that are used to bigger phones with bigger batteries could be disappointed, though you should expect around four and a half to maybe five hours of screen on time, if you're, just using your phone for simple stuff, but you're going to get a bit less than that, if you're doing a lot of gaming or recording a lot of video.

Before I talk about the cameras which are also great by the way, I just want to take a quick minute to thank the sponsor of this video skillshare is an incredible online learning platform that I've been using for a while. Now you can learn from thousands and thousands of really talented people through their online classes, they've got classes on pretty much anything. You can think of illustration photography, animation, marketing and a lot more. I've been watching a lot of content lately to try and up my creativity gain, and one of my favorite classes is Nathaniel. Drew's creativity unleashed there's a ton of content in that class, but one of my favorite parts is when he talks about addressing the insecurities that we struggle with as creators.

He says that something we need to keep in mind is that no one in the world has the exact same combination of thoughts, life experiences and memories, and that basically means that, just by virtue of existing, we have something original to offer the world it's a new year and no matter what 2021 can throw at us. You can always spend it by doing something meaningful, like learning a new skill or hobby through skill share's online classes, it's really affordable at less than 10 bucks a month with an annual subscription, and in my opinion, it's totally worth it. The first 1 000 people to use the link in my video description will get a free trial of skill share premium membership so that you can explore your creativity further thanks to skill share for sponsoring this portion of the video. And now, let's get back to the 12 mini okay, the cameras, the 12 mini, shares the exact same cameras as the more expensive, iPhone, 12 and 12 pro. Although the 12 pro comes with an extra telephoto and LIDAR sensor, both rear-facing cameras are excellent.

The ultrawide can be a bit softer than the main camera, but it still takes great photos and videos. Nonetheless, the normal wide-angle camera is now slightly brighter than last year's and can take better shots at night. The iPhone 12 series did introduce Dolby Vision, HDR video, but honestly I find it a bit finicky to color grade, and therefore I usually just turn it off in the camera settings. It does look really cool when played back on an iPhone or some other device that has HDR, though either way you really aren't compromising on cameras by going with the 12 mini. In my opinion, yes, the telephoto camera and the LIDAR sensor can be useful, but when I was using the 12 pro as my daily driver, I rarely used them.

If you want to see exactly what the LIDAR does on the 12 pro. I've got a pretty interesting video on that up here, nope up here, yeah over there, the iPhone 12 series also introduced a Jewish way of charging and connecting accessories called MagSafe. I say new is because technically MagSafe existed in the older max for charging, but it's completely different in the new iPhone so yeah anyway, I do like the MagSafe charger. It makes wireless charging a lot easier because it lines the charger up perfectly with magnets so that it gets the fastest wireless charging. It's capable of every single time, which is 12 watts, there's also a few magnetic car mounts available.

Some cases wallets and a few other accessories, but nothing that really makes the experience of using the 12 mini stand out from other smartphones. In my opinion, the last thing that could be annoying for you with the 12 mini is the problem that all high-end iPhones are facing right now and that's face ID under normal circumstances. Face ID is fantastic. It's fast, it's accurate, and it works in the dark, but in our current state of affairs in the world these are far from normal circumstances. Wearing a mask makes face ID useless, and you're forced to use the passcode unlock.

In that scenario, I really do wish apple started using the under the screen, fingerprint readers or, if they're too, scared to use that relatively new tech throw a fingerprint reading power button in their like they did with the new iPad Air. All right. Let's talk about the price. If you buy this phone without a carrier, deal it'll cost you 729 us dollars straight from apple, that's far from cheap, particularly for a compact phone, not only that, but the phone doesn't even come with a charging brick or headphones just an USB to lightning cable. Either way.

I don't think the 12 mini has a terrible price tag, especially since I love the phone so much, but I think it would be much more of a smash hit if it were priced at. You know, 600 or even 650, as opposed to 730. So here's my final verdict after two months, the iPhone 12 mini, is still a fantastic buy. It's fast. It's got a great display in cameras and best of all, it's small.

If you want to check out my full review of the 12 mini click on the link right here, and if you like this video, please give it a like to support my channel and, as always, have a great day.

Source : Mark Spurrell