Sharp chose an original approach to the front camera integration of its latest phone, the Sharp Aquos S3 Mini. It’s not quite integrated through a notch, but rather like a cyclops’ eye, much like we saw on the Essential Phone. In spite of that, this is quite a premium phone, with an affordable price.
Sharp Aquos S3 Mini arrives with midrange specs and feels like an Essential PH-1 clone. The fingerprint scanner is placed below the screen, within a Home button. It’s got a 5.5 inch InCell panel with a 2040 x 1080 pixel resolution. As usual for Sharp over the past years, the screen to body ratio is generous, at 87.5%. The front camera is a 20 MP shooter with AI features.
At the back we find a 2.5D glass panel, with light reflections that feel like the ones we saw on the Huawei Honor 8 and Honor 9. Inside the handset there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor, 6 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64 GB of storage, plus a microSD card slot. I find it odd that we get so much RAM here, when the CPU and display feel like a compromise. I’m also surprised by the lack of a dual back camera, since we only get a singular 16 MP back shooter.
Sharp Aquos S3 Mini uses a 3020 mAh battery and on the OS front, there’s Android Nougat with Sharp’s Smile UX On top. The device has Face Unlock, with a promised response time of just 0.1 seconds. Luckily the audio jack is kept and we also have an USB Type-C port. The product is available in blue, black or gold and it’s priced at $252.
