Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini to be the first phone support AT&T’s HD Voice

AT&T has announced that starting May 23 the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini will be its first phone to support HD Voice. The carrier promises that HD Voice, enabled through the phone’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) capabilities, delivers clearer calls with less background noise. It’s a heady promise that will unfortunately be limited at launch; the feature is only going live in Minneapolis and Chicago to start.

AT&T has announced its first 4G smartphone to come with support for HD Voice as standard. Sadly, it’s not one of the new top-of-the-range devices, and isn’t even very recent. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini from last year. The HD Voice system works using VoLTE, or Voice Over LTE, and enables you to use data while making a call. To get your hands on the Galaxy S4 Mini, you can pay $50 and sign up for a two-year contract, or if you decide to go with one of AT&T’s Next plans, then it’ll be $14.24 per month on Next 18 or $18.50 per month on Next 12. The Galaxy S4 Mini was originally announced in June last year, so is coming up to a year old, and it shows in the specifications. The screen measures 4.3-inches and has a 960 x 540 pixel resolution, while the processor is a dual-core, 1.7GHz Snapdragon chip. Around the back of the phone – which looks like a small Galaxy S4 – is an 8-megapixel camera.