Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini VS BlackBerry Q5

BlackBerry Q5: Key specs and features

BlackBerry has gone down the route of carefully optimising its hardware and software configurations, so across the board you get consistently smooth and seamless performance for navigating BlackBerry 10’s heavily gesture based menus and homescreens.

To cut down on costs you only get 8GB of internal storage but fortunately the BlackBerry Q5 is equipped with microSD support for cards up to 32GB, so if you do need some flexibility for lots of documents, music or films then there are certainly options.

The screen is a particularly strong area. It may be smaller than your average modern smartphone but at 3.1-inches it’s noticeably larger than fixed Qwerty phones of old and all the better for it.

BlackBerry has opted for IPS LCD and it sports the same 720x720 pixel resolution as the BlackBerry Q10 at 328 pixels-per-inch (ppi) resulting in some crisp, detailed visuals and very sharp text. Colour and brightness are reasonably punchy too.

The camera is a 5-megapixel unit with an LED flash and 1080p video capture. This fares well enough but isn’t going to move mountains. Conversely, the 2-megapixel front-facing secondary is above average for video calls and captures 720p quality video.

Undoubtedly one of the biggest draws of the BlackBerry Q5 is the BlackBerry 10 operating system itself. This is very different from what we’re used to from BlackBerry’s older software and a lot of thought has gone into making an enjoyable user experience. Multitasking is uniquely positioned at the centre of the system thanks to a couple of clever implementations.

The BlackBerry Hub is an ever-present aggregation centre of all your notifications, emails, messages and social networking activity – you can always access this screen from anywhere on the device with a simple swipe gesture and it means you’re not constantly hopping in and out of messaging apps and email clients.

The second thing is the way you can minimise active apps into little preview windows, which function rather like widgets, these populate an additional homescreen so all your active apps are housed in one convenient place.

There’s another advantage we’ve discovered through our time with the BlackBerry Q10 which is unique to Qwerty-equipped BlackBerry 10 devices – namely the immediacy of the keyboard access and how that integrates with BlackBerry 10.

BlackBerry 10 features a universal search feature for on-device content such as apps and off-device content, ie: allowing you to search the web, but on the BlackBerry Q5 you can literally just start typing from the homescreen and this will happen automatically, which is very convenient and does offer a very rapid way of interacting with the handset.

Also of note is the BlackBerry Q5’s battery pack, which is a 2,180mAh unit and should provide quite a long lifespan with normal use. We’d expect to get about a day and a half out of this quite easily. For connectivity the BlackBerry Q5 has plenty to offer with both 4G and HSPA+ 3G for data, microUSB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (with Hotspot), NFC and GPS.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini: Key specs and features

The Galaxy S4 Mini may be ranked lower on the scale than its all-star namesake but it’s certainly no slouch in the processor department. It runs Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 400 chip, which is dual-core, clocked at 1.7GHz and carries an Adreno 305 graphics processing unit (GPU).

There are a couple of different versions and at time of writing but Samsung hasn’t revealed how many will be coming to the UK. We know at the very least we’ll see the 4G one coming via EE which has 2GB of RAM and NFC capabilities – it can also connect via 3G networks, of course.

The 3G only model, which may or may not make an appearance in the UK, has 1.5GB of RAM but no NFC connectivity.

As with many of Samsung’s recent devices running up-to-date hardware, performance is reliably speedy on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with the company’s TouchWiz UI layer stacked on top.

Thanks to Jelly Bean’s optimisations screen transitions are smooth and the processor has a reasonable amount of clout to cope with intensive apps and gaming on titles from Google Play.

Other connectivity capabilities include microUSB, Wi-Fi (with Hotspot), DLNA, Bluetooth, GPS and infrared – which allows you to control compatible TVs. The battery is a 1,900mAh unit which should give a reasonable lifespan on a single charge.

The Galaxy S4 Mini carries 8GB of internal storage (with 5GB available to the user) and microSD support for cards up to 64GB.

The camera is a decent setup along similar lines to what we saw on the older Galaxy S3 flagship, it’s rated at 8-megapixels, features an LED flash, HDR mode and panoramic capture while video is 1080p quality. On the front there’s a 1.9-megapixel secondary which should provide good video call quality.

As usual, Android has a tractor-beam like pull to it in its most recent formats with good stability and performance, plenty of fun (and handy) swipe gesture control for the various, neatly arranged menus and an intuitive multitasking carousel.

It’s also extremely well-stocked on apps, games and other content such as films, music and eBooks via Google Play, with over 700,000 apps and games at last count.

The Galaxy S4 Mini’s display is a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED with a 960x540 pixel resolution at 256 pixels-per-inch. Colour, contrast and brightness are good and while the picture clarity is fair it is not the sharpest screen we’ve seen.

It is adequate for the Galaxy S4 Mini’s place in the market, however, and we wouldn’t say Samsung has cut corners here.

Direct specs comparison

Device	BlackBerry Q5	Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini
Dimensions	120.6x66x10.8mm, 120g	124.6x61.3x8.9mm,107g
Display	3.1-inch IPS+ LCD,720x720 pixels,328ppi	4.3-inch Super AMOLED,960x540 pixels,256ppi
Camera	5-megapixel,LED flash,1080p video	8-megapixel,LED flash,1080p video
Storage	8GB, microSD up to 32GB	8GB, microSD up to 64GB
Processor, RAM, Graphics	1.2GHz/1.2GHz dualcore Qualcomm S4 Snapdragon,2GB RAM	1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 Snapdragon ,2GB RAM
Operating System,	BlackBerry 10	Android 4.2.2
UI	n/a	TouchWiz
Connectivity	microUSB,Bluetooth,NFC,Wi-Fi,Wi-Fi Hotspot,4G,GPS	Bluetooth,microUSB,NFC,Wi-Fi,Wi-Fi Hotspot,GPS,4G,Infrared
Battery	2,180mAh	1,900mAh