iPhone 12 Mini review after 2 months: Why it's my favorite iPhone! By Paul Bradford

After using the iPhone 12 mini daily for the past two months, I think it just might be my favorite iPhone ever made. In a world of massive phones, it's really refreshing to see a smaller flagship iPhone. We have seen small iPhones in the past with the iPhone SE and then the iPhone SE 2, but I wouldn't really consider those flagship phones. They had some major compromises that set them apart from the main iPhone lineup, but the 12 Mini doesn't have those. It's literally an iPhone 12, only smaller and 100 dollars cheaper, and a lot of people, including me, are finding out that's exactly what they wanted The 12 mini has the new sharp edges of the 12, a bit of a throwback to the iPhone 4 and 5 if you remember those phones, and it feels very futuristic in the hand, just a minimal slab of metal and glass. That smaller form factor makes it super easy to slide in pockets, but more importantly, I have relatively small hands and I can still touch all four corners of the display, something I can't really do comfortably on the normal sized iPhone 12.

And I'm telling you guys, even though it is a smaller phone, it doesn't feel that small when you're using it because the display is edge to edge, it's 5.4 inches, and to put that in perspective, the iphone 6 plus 7 plus and 8 plus from just a few years ago, those all had 5.5 inch displays, and those phones footprints were way larger. I've never once felt that this phone was too small, it just fits so well in the hand and it's really just a joy to use. If you have massive hands or if you've been using a huge phone like the iphone 11 pro max or a samsung galaxy note device, this phone might not be for you, but for anybody else, I'd encourage you to at least try it out in store and see for yourself how it feels, it might surprise you. The speakers on the earpiece and the bottom of the phone sound good, not great, but a noticeable improvement over the iphone se that i was coming from. All the new iPhone 12s have what's called "ceramic shield", a new special glass that coats both the front and the back of the phone that Apple says provides the phone with four times more drop protection than any previous iPhone glass.

But about a week into owning the phone I accidentally put that ceramic shield to the test. Okay, so I went on this hike earlier today, as I was running, I tripped and I fell and I just absolutely smashed the screen of this phone into a rock. I did have a tempered glass screen protector on that was shattered from the fall. So we're gonna peel that screen protector off and see if the phone itself is actually damaged. It's coming off, it's very shattered towards the bottom, it is absolutely perfect, no cracks whatsoever on the glass.

As far as other noticeable design differences, the 12 mini is fully compatible with all new MagSafe accessories, which is the new magnetic accessory lineup from apple that works with magnets in the back of the phone. I haven't had the chance to test any of these accessories yet, but from what I've heard from friends, MagSafe is kinda meh at the moment. Like the MagSafe charger is pretty cool, but you might as well just set your phone on a wireless charger, it's not like that's super difficult, and the wallet has been known to pop off the phone relatively easily, so that's pretty concerning. But who knows, maybe some new MagSafe accessories will come out that will be more useful than the ones currently available. The display is extremely sharp, actually, it's the sharpest iPhone display ever with 476 pixels per inch, and it's an OLED XDR display, which is a huge upgrade over something like the iPhone 11 and the iPhone SE's LCD displays.

You get much better dynamic range with deeper blacks and a much brighter max brightness when viewing HDR content, and that's really nice because HDR content is becoming more and more common especially here on YouTube, so it's great that I can watch that straight from my phone. Speaking of HDR, a huge new feature of the iPhone 12 lineup is the ability to record Dolby vision HDR footage at up to 4k 30 frames per second, and the pro models can actually record up to 4k 60. Video filmed on this phone looks amazing, stabilization is great, and with HDR recording, the highlights really pop out. Unfortunately, you won't be able to notice the difference here over this YouTube video because this video is not HDR, but trust me, it looks great on the phone. Photos are fantastic as well, very typical iphone style photos with good color saturation and perhaps a little over exaggerated dynamic range.

You have your regular 12 megapixel lens and then another 12 megapixel ultra wide lens. I love the ultra wide angle perspective, I use this all the time and I would take this any day of the week over a telephoto lens. It also performs really well in low light situations because of apple's night mode. This picture was taken at around 11:30 PM and there were no lights on within 100 yards or so, yet the picture still looks relatively well exposed, even if it does lose a bit of detail that you'll notice if you start to zoom in. By far the weakest area of the iphone 12 mini is the battery life, and with a phone this small you just can't fit the same size battery that you could put on a larger phone, and that's noticeable from the screen on time you get with this.

Most days i end up with maybe five to ten percent battery life after about four to four and a half hours of screen on time, so that isn't terrible but it's not great. For most people that should be usable but if you're a heavy user you will probably kill this thing before the end of the day so that's definitely something to consider if you're looking into the 12 mini. And lastly, I'll briefly touch on the speed of this phone. I mean, it's fast, it has the newest A14 bionic chip, so it will pretty much handle whatever you throw at it, and if you get this phone, you should be set for the next three to four years easily. It also has 5G capabilities, which was a big headlining feature of the iPhone 12s, but at least on T-mobile, it's kind of spotty at the moment.

In some locations, I'll get speeds on par with 5G estimates, but at my apartment, where I normally am for the majority of my days, my speeds are just about the same as typical 4G speeds. So obviously your results will vary depending on what carrier you have and they should continue to improve as 5G continues to become more widespread. So the 12 mini is impressive, to say the least. I love this phone, and I think this is a big step in making people realize that small phones still have a place in the flagship market. I'm really interested to see what other companies are going to come out with their own tiny phones, not just as budget options like we've seen them in the past, but as a full small flagship device.

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Source : Paul Bradford