still relevant today for a low to mid range phone

[nemuro]

I'm looking to change my iphone 5c. I know the performance of the two phones is almost the same.
This would be my first Samsung. I'm a bit scared of switching because friends of mine had S4 (not mini) variants with major issues including replacement of mainboard).
The reason I am looking at this phone is that I want something with more freedom and future proofing ( removable battery, sdcard, nfc, IR ) and a bigger screen, while being around the $150-$200 price range

So:
Would anyone recommend buying it today?
Has anyone used this phone more than a year or two? I'm looking for a phone to last me at least 2-3 years, as I don't change them that often.
How is the rom availability and performance and stability of the available custom roms?

 

[sasank360]

The s4 mini is a decent old phone. It is compact, it is powerfull enough to do most of the work we do on smartphones in 2016.
It has an excellent (A+) development community. You will surely love the little features like removable battery, sd card, ir blaster etc.
I have used them a lot. Battery life on this phone, from my experience is just above average. Although my phone now suffers some ghost drain.
The phone has official cyanogenmod 13 support which is phenomenal. Some high end phones still do not have that support.
In terms of stability as of now cm12.1 is the most stable and all roms based on cm12.1, like aicp, ressurection remix etc are very stable and daily driver
worthy. CM13 will be stable soon. The work devs put into this phone almost makes me cry, :crying: Samsung takes money and gives no updates, while
these awesome guys do it for free, with limited resources.
The performance of this phone is adequate for most 2016 needs as i said earlier. Recently i ran antutu while on cm13, I got a score of 33K. Which is on par
with most midrange chipsets these days that have 8-10 cores Not that benchmarks matter a lot, but real world usage is brilliant. I have very few lags or
memory issues with this phone. It holds up really good with moderate-slightly heavy usage. But ofcourse with really hardcore use, phone may stutter here and
there. But performance for a midrange phone from 2013,... this is great.

 

[Teracotta]

Samsung more or less maxed out the technology on the S4. There's very little the S5+ offer over the S4 and even regression in some categories. The S6 might have more cores and memory, but it handles tasks poorly and can't be modded. The S5 has useless bloat features and no real RAM or processor update over the S4. Most of the "innovation" now is cosmetic.

The S4 Mini might not have the best camera, but specs-wise it's comparable to the full power S3 LTE, with the S4 interface. With CyanogenMod's Lolipop/Marshmallow roms and the Brazilian Kitkat bootloader, there is no fear of being locked into a specific ROM, as you can flash from JellyBean through Marshmallow without problem.

It's an underrated phone. I don't agree with sansak that the development community is A+, because these forums are rather quiet for such a modable phone. The phone is thankfully still supported among other things.

Is it relevant? Very yes. Just because it's "old" does not mean "bad". Galaxy S quality plateaued after the S4.