Why buy an Apple iPhone 13 mini?
Mozillion Apple iPhone 13 mini review
One of the fastest phones you can buy
Great screen, smaller design
Incredibly stylish and surprisingly strong
Not convinced? Try one of these alternatives to an Apple iPhone 13 mini:
iPhone 13 - same phone, bigger size and screen
iPhone 13 Pro - same phone, bigger, with a better camera
iPhone 12 mini - last year’s model, but you’d hardly know it
Introduction
With the new iPhone 13 mini, Apple has gone for relatively minor upgrades over the iPhone 12 mini. There’s more storage, a faster processor, and an improvement to the already impressive battery life. The camera gets a makeover, too.
While it might not be mould-breaking, the iPhone 13 mini remains one of the most feature packed and powerful small phones you can get. It combines 5G, waterproofing, gorgeous style and bullet-proof build quality, all in an eminently pocketable package.
Design
There’s lots to admire about the iPhone 13 mini. Most importantly, it’s a genuinely small phone by today’s standards, making it easy to use one-handed or slip into smaller pockets or bags. It features the same bezel-free design as other iPhones, so the 5.4” screen extends very nearly to the actual edge of the phone. At the front there’s Ceramic Shield glass, incredibly resistant to drop damage, and the sides are made of tough but classy aluminium.
The iPhone 13 mini shares the straight edges found on the iPhone 12 mini, but it’s subtly different in a couple of other ways. The camera lenses are ranged diagonally in a slightly larger camera hump, and the screen notch is noticeably smaller. It’s put on a few grams, weighing in at 140g, and it’s a quarter of a millimetre deeper. Connectivity is still via a Lightning port, and you can jazz the whole thing up with a range of MagSafe accessories.
Camera
The iPhone 13 mini combines a single 12-megapixel front-facing camera with a 12MP dual camera system at the rear. While the raw specifications might be unremarkable, incredible image processing ensures that the iPhone 13 mini takes pictures you’ll want to keep. The wide-angle lens has a new larger sensor and a big ƒ/1.6 aperture for great low-light performance, enhanced by image stabilisation and powerful night mode processing.
Not much else has changed compared to the iPhone 12 mini. The rear camera now benefits from sensor-shift stabilisation - previously restricted only to Pro models. There’s also Photographic Styles, a new set of smart filters that can selectively improve areas of a scene - for example, by boosting colour without ruining skin tones.
Video
Despite its small size, the iPhone 13 mini packs in great filmmaking features. Both the front and rear cameras record 4K video up to 60 frames per second, and you can even shoot HDR Dolby Vision at up to 60fps. The rear camera supports HD slo-mo at 240fps, while the front camera manages 120fps.
Perhaps the best of the new features is Cinematic Mode, which works a bit like Portrait Mode but for videos. Use it to create more compelling videos with a shallow depth of field, for example framing a pin-sharp face against an out-of-focus car interior. You can edit blur and focus after shooting, too.
Display
The iPhone 13 mini inherits almost exactly the same 5.4” OLED screen used in the iPhone 12 mini. Resolution remains at 2,340x1,080 for a pixel depth of 476 pixels per inch, making this the sharpest of all the iPhone 13 screens. A minor tweak sees the typical max brightness rise from 625 to 800 nits, while contrast remains an impressive 2,000,000:1. Unfortunately there’s still no boost to the 60Hz refresh rate - only the iPhone 13 Pro models get 120Hz.
One small but significant change is that the trademark ‘notch’ housing the TrueDepth camera has shrunk - it’s still bigger than the cutout used by many competitors, though.
Processor
The iPhone 13 mini gets Apple’s latest A15 Bionic chip, which gives it more than enough speed to see off the fastest competitors. But while the iPhone 13 Pro models get a five-core graphics processing unit (GPU), the iPhone 13 mini has four. While this means it lags behind the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max in benchmarking and challenging games, we challenge anyone to notice the difference in everyday use - it’s still one of the fastest phones you can buy.
Battery
Apple has managed to eke out more battery life across the iPhone 13 range, and says that the iPhone 13 mini can play back video for an impressive 17 hours. It can stream video for 13 hours, or play audio for up to 55 hours. In everyday use we’d expect it to last somewhere around the average of those figures - certainly going more than a day between charges.
When the juice does run out, you can charge the iPhone 13 mini with a Qi or MagSafe wireless charger. And if you’ve got a 20W wired charger, Apple says you can expect to restore 50% charge in less than 30 minutes.
Colours & Options
Like the regular iPhone 13, the iPhone 13 mini comes in blue, pink and red. You can also choose midnight or starlight - essentially fancy shades of black and white. You can now choose from 128GB, 256GB or a generous 512GB of storage - gone is the stingy 64GB previously reserved for the entry-level model.
You still won’t find headphones or a charger in the box, however. The iPhone 13 mini arrives only with a USB-C to Lightning cable. You’ll need a USB-A to Lightning cable to charge from most power adaptors, cars and other devices. Other accessories are more exciting, especially the range of colourful MagSafe cases and chargers. Note that the iPhone 13 mini is slightly deeper than the iPhone 12 mini - most iPhone 12 mini cases won’t fit.
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