With this release, the face buttons were changed to capacitive touch, matching the rest of the Galaxy lineup.

It was succeeded by the Samsung Galaxy Mini 2, featuring better screen (480x320 high contrast type vs old 320x240), higher clocked processor (600 vs. 800 MHz), and drastically improved memory (278 vs. 384 MB of RAM; 160 vs. 1830 MB of internal storage available) over the original, as well as Bluetooth v3.0, Wi-Fi Direct & NFC support, among others.

The Galaxy Mini is a 3.5G smartphone that offers quad-band GSM and was announced with two-band HSDPA (900/2100 MHz) at 7.2 Mbit/s.

An official upgrade to Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread) was released via Samsung Kies on 9 December 2011 for some mobile operators.

The Galaxy Mini can also be flashed with custom ROMs such as CyanogenMod releases (although not officially supported by Samsung) where it is codenamed tass.