HTC Mini – the remote control for your 5-inch phone

You know what that smartphone with a barely pocket-able 5-inch screen needs? An NFC-capable remote control that allows you to hold a slimmer piece of plastic to your head as you make phone calls and control media playback. Sure, you could just buy a smaller phone, but in case you hadn’t thought of that HTC has announced the Mini.

The HTC Butterfly and Droid DNA are both huge, beautiful phones with amazing 1080p screens and specs that are clearly there to allow you to do more than check Facebook and play Temple Run. These are pieces of hardware that, at their core, are capable of being powerful media servers that can encode 1080p video on the fly and stream it wirelessly to your television through HTC’s media link adaptor. In HTC’s vision of the world, your Butterfly sits on the charger when you are at home and acts as the brain for your television. Unfortunately, while it is busy feeding your television content, it’s not doing a very good job being a smartphone.

The HTC Mini serves as the rest of your smartphone. Tap the Mini to the back of your phone, and the NFC assisted Bluetooth pairing will allow the Butterfly to send notifications and phone calls to the remote control-shaped accessory. Everything on the Mini is displayed through a small monochrome display that doesn’t appear to have a backlight. From the Mini you can place phone calls, check your email, and control the content playing from the Butterfly to the television. If you’ve misplaced your Mini, but are still within Bluetooth range, you can use the remote to set off an alarm on the phone to locate it. You can even use the Mini to take photos from the camera app on the Butterfly, though we’re not entirely sure why that’s a feature.

While certainly a quirky little accessory, it’s an interesting approach to a problem that only exists because phones like the Butterfly and DNA exist. Right now HTC plans to only release the Mini for the Butterfly in China, though pricing still remains a mystery, and there are no active plans to release a similar piece of hardware for the Droid DNA in the US.