Samsung on Thursday unveiled a smaller version of its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone, aiming to grab a bigger share in the mid-tier segment as well as the widely rumored stripped down version of Apple's iPhone. The Galaxy S4 mini weighs 107g, it has a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, an 1.7 Gigahertz dual-core processor, a 8-mega pixel rear-facing camera and a 1.9-megapixel HD front-facing camera.

The original S4, which hit the 10 million-sale mark last week to become Samsung's fastest selling smartphone, has a bigger 5-inch full high-definition screen and a 13-mega pixel camera. Special features such as Sound&Shot stores sound and voice together as pictures are taken, and Panorama Shot, allows users to photograph the full view of their surroundings.

Special features such as Sound&Shot stores sound and voice together as pictures are taken, and Panorama Shot, allows users to photograph the full view of their surroundings.

Travel assistance and information service is provided trhough the preloaded S Travel application.

Users can also automatically arrange photos in a smart format with the Story Album function. Photos taken by GALAXY S4 mini are automatically gathered and saved according to the user?s timeline, geo-tagging information, or a specific event to create a photo album.

Samsung GALAXY S4 mini also allows users to share and build connections. Users can simultaneously listen to the same music and play the games together with friends using Group Play feature, and chat with multiple friends and add animations, voice and video recordings to messages using ChatON.

The GALAXYS4 mini also makes international travel easy with S Translator, which provides instant text or voice translation at email, text message or ChatON.

Samsung Hub provides a single entry for Samsung contents and services. Users can browse through a variety of content across services including music, video, books, games and learning content as well as purchase and manage contents from a single Samsung Account. Samsung Hub features an intergraded search when users browse a keyword, the results will show related content from all of the services at once.Users can also control their TVs through WatchON?s IR remote which transforms the GALAXY S4 mini into a remote to control the user?s TVs, set-top box, and DVD player.

The GALAXY S4 mini empowers users by keeping them up-to-date with personal health and well-being details through the S Health app.

The S4 mini will be available in two colors (white and black) and will have 4G LTE, or 3G HSPA or 3G Dual SIM versions.

Samsung did not announce a price for the phone or give a launch date, but it is estimated to be priced at around $350.

The launch comes ahead of the speculated low-priced iPhone later this year.

Samsung is also holding a press event in London next month, whee it is expected to unveil more varieties of the S4 including a model with optical camera zoom functionality as well as a phone with water-proof features.

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