Hello iPhone 12 Mini

Why

Honestly, the iPhone 12 mini was never on my radar because frankly speaking I always go with the best possible camera system and therefore my considerations were limited to the Pro lineup.

With that said, now that I need a phone that I can use one-handed, I started looking at the iPhone 12 mini. I was amazed how much Apple packed into this tiny device. Instead of iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Magnificent is a suitable and fitting name.

From my perspective, the differences are:

• lack of a telephoto lens
• 4gb ram compared to 6gb on the Pro models
• Obviously, screen and battery size
• Pro models have textured glass back and therefore the back of the non-Pro models are somewhat of a fingerprint magnet and also more sticky to touch
• ProRaw support

That’s it. Everything else is fundamentally the same. My main concern was the lack of the telephoto camera. Thanks to this article, I discovered that out of more than 1200 photos I took on my iPhone 12 Pro, less than 30 photos were taken with the telephoto camera. With this insight, I was even more eager to explore iPhone 12 mini’s suitability to my use case.

I figured, now (three months before iPhone 13) is also a good time to undertake this experiment and take advantage of Apple’s two weeks returns policy.

Day One

Transfer process

I deliberately bought the 64gb version because I wanted to see how well iOS optimises storage. Likewise, I am coming from a iPhone 12 Pro 128gb (62gb used) to iPhone 12 Mini 64gb.

Despite numerous attempts, transferring

Using device-to-device migration was unsuccessful. I suspect that this was largely due to the reduced storage in the iPhone 12 Mini. Thankfully, restore from iCloud worked exceptionally well. Apple has polished this process to the extent that my Apple Watch was also transferred to the new iPhone without any data loss and maintaining my cellular plan and credit cards on Apple Pay.

Side note: I am impressed by how well optimised storage works. I have used 40gb of the 64gb storage.

Initial Impressions (24 hours)

• one-handed use 👍
• portability 👍
• barely feel it in the pocket 🤷‍♂️
• light as a feature 👍
• one-handed typing 👎
• speakers 👎
• sticky back 👎

It’s early days and I did miss my larger screen, especially when consuming content. But this size is a breath of fresh air.

I intend to give it at least a solid week.

This article has been written and edited on iPhone 12 mini using Ulysses.

Originally published at https://merecivilian.com on July 16, 2021.