Technology

Give Your Oversized Smartphone Its Own Mini Cell Phone

By ABS Contributor | Published on: January 26, 2013 Comments (0)

Huge smartphones and “phablets,” the phone-tablet hybrids, are great for some customers. They provide more screen real estate, and can double as miniature tablets. But the bigger these devices get, the more awkward they become for phone calls. If your 5-inch smartphone has you feeling like Zach Morris, then HTC has a solution: give it its own personal dumbphone.

Meet the HTC Mini. Though you might mistake it for the phone you had in 2006, it’s an accessory for the HTC Butterfly (known as the Droid DNA in the U.S.) Butterfly owners in China can use the Mini to make and take calls without removing their supersized phones from their pockets.

The device connects to the Butterfly via near field communication (NFC). It’s small, light, and could be dropped in a shirt pocket while the much larger Butterfly sits in a deeper pocket or purse. In addition to making calls, it can show messages, calendar appointments, and call history on its monochrome display.

The HTC Mini has a few other tricks. With the Butterfly tethered to a TV set, the Mini can also serve as a remote control for menu navigation. And if you misplace your smartphone, the Mini will call it to help you to quickly find it.

Is the Mini an innovative stroke of genius, or an illustration of how ridiculously oversized our phones have become? Though we still call them phones, smartphones are really pocketable computers. Perhaps if you see the Mini as an ultra-portable phone accessory for your primary computer, it sounds a bit less absurd…

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