CNN) -- The Galaxy S4 mini, a slimmed-down version of
Samsung's flagship smartphone, is on its way, the company announced Thursday.
Widely rumored after an accidental
leak, the company confirmed that the mini will be one of the products rolled
out at a Samsung
event in London on June 20.
On the heels of a hot start for the
Galaxy S4, which the company says sold 10
million units in less than a month, the Korean gadget-maker seems to
be homing in on the rival iPhone with a handset that promises to be easier to
grip than its bulkier cousins in the Galaxy line.
The mini will have a 4.3-inch
display screen, comparable to the iPhone 5's 4-inch screen, and weigh 3.77
ounces -- a pip lighter than the iPhone's 3.95.
The Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch screen,
while Samsung's Galaxy Note II "phablet" has a whopping 5.5-inch
display.
"We
want to give people more choices with Galaxy S4 mini, similar look and feel of
Galaxy S4 for more compact and practical uses," J.K. Shin, CEO and
president of Samsung's mobile division, said in a blog post.
The new phone will feature an
8-megapixel rear-facing camera (down from the S4's 13 megapixels) and
2-megapixel front-facing camera. It also will come with 8GB of internal memory,
running up to 64GB if, as with the S4, the user adds an available memory
microchip.
It will be a sleek 9mm wide (.35
inches), a hair wider than the iPhone 5's 7.6mm (.3 inches), and run the latest
version of Google's Android operating system, Jelly Bean, with a 1.7 Ghz
dual-core processor.
The device will come in either white
or black. No price or release date was announced.
The announcement further illustrates
the divergent mobile strategies of Samsung and Apple. While the Cupertino tech
giant fine-tunes a single phone, Samsung floods the zone with a variety of
models, ranging from low-end handsets to its more upscale Galaxy line.
"Samsung's overall smartphone
strategy is about producing scores of iterations at various price points and
screen sizes in order to saturate the market with as much of its hardware as
possible," Natasha Lomas wrote for TechCrunch.
"(It's) a strategy that, coupled with its massive marketing budget,
continues to be extremely successful for the Korean electronics giant, making
it far harder for other Android (makers) such as HTC to compete with their far
more modest device portfolios."

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