About the best way to describe what Samsung makes for somebody who has never seen a smartphone is pointing to an enormous landmark that is deliberately big and easily visible. Apple has famously been going in the other direction and refusing to go anywhere near the size of what Sammy have produced with physical display size. Even the most recent iPhone 5S flagship for 2013 for the fruit company was only 4.0-inches in size. Compare that to the Galaxy S5 Mini and the Mini does not look so small at all. In fact, this smaller S5 variant is still bigger than the 5S coming in at 4.47-inches in size. If rumors are true this year’s iPhone will only be marginally bigger than that. From a size perspective that makes the S5 mini a good buy. However, we all know there is more to it than that.

Yes, the mini device is not just small in stature but also the specs under the hood are reduced to allow the manufacturers a chance to release a cheaper version of its big brother. Often it can result with inadequate specs to be perfectly honest, and it is hard to wonder if companies like Samsung do not make profits just from people being unaware that the hardware changes at all.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini

That becomes clear once again where Sammy has not packed power into this one. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 system chip, it is Quad core and it will have some graphics processor, but these exact bits of information are currently hard to find. That is partly because they are somewhat irrelevant because they will be less than impressive. Continuing the trend of specs we are not fond of is the 2 megapixel front-facing snapper and a 8 megapixel rear-facing camera. To be honest, even though it is less than half of what we get out of the full-sized flagships of today, it is what we expected there so that is not too bad. When it comes to megapixels history tells us that it is either 8 or 12 and not 10. I do not understand why that is. We have seen 2 megapixel cameras so we know they are more than capable of jumping up by 2’s if they want to. Anyway, and not being generous and giving the 12 they have given the 8.

Now for the good news. This handset will have two of the main selling points that I just reviewed on the Sony Xperia Z2. They are dustproof and waterproof. When it comes to water there are many skeptics because as we learned with watches many years ago, just because the label says water-resistant does not mean it will work. Furthermore, it can often have a different depth that it can go before it gives in and lets the water inside. In this case, Sammy has declared that this mini smartphone will easily stay at least 30 minutes full submerged underwater. They have not given the depth, but it is safe to say I would not be taking this one in the ocean with more. A more realistic trip under water might be if I accidentally dropped it in the toilet bowl or left it in my pants pocket before I put them in the wash. We should at least see fewer handsets destroyed by these means.

This handset will have two different model numbers. One is the SM-G800F and the other is the SM-G800H. According to a popular Android blog the first model number is destined for Finland and that could mean it also gets sold in most of Europe.