Huupe Mini 2 Review: More Game Than It Can Handle

TriangleUp Buy Now Multiple Buying Options Available $499 $429 at Shop $499 $429 at Amazon Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Rating: 5 /10 Open rating explainer Information WIRED It’s definitely an upgrade to the typical indoor basketball experience. Plenty of play modes (perhaps too many), plus lots of streaming options. TIRED The hard included ball makes for a very noisy experience. Battery drains quickly, even when not in use. Some app modes didn’t work at all. Buggy remote. Weak speakers. No Netflix. Eventually it all gets a bit stale. If your mom was one of those who always said, “ Don’t play ball in the house ,” well, she’s going to absolutely hate the Huupe Mini 2. Huupe manufactures smart basketball hoops and add-on kits for existing setups that track shots, light up the board when a point is registered, and include social features like global challenges and leaderboards. The Huupe Mini 2 is the pint-sized, indoor version of that idea, clipping over the top of a door so you can shoot hoops without ever having to leave the room. I’ve been testing one out for weeks, and while it’s a fun diversion, some of its features overreach beyond its core functionality, resulting in an experience that bricks as much as it dunks. Season Tickets Photograph: Christopher Null The Huupe Mini 2 is, effectively, a smart television with a basketball hoop mounted to it. Or rather, a smart TV that comes with a basketball hoop that you have to mount yourself, courtesy of four screws and a little elbow grease. The LCD screen measures 19 inches diagonally, plus a hefty border that includes stereo speakers and a camera used to track you and your b-ball prowess. (Total size of the backboard is 25 inches diagonally, which fits comfortably within a door frame.) A 5-inch inflatable rubber basketball is included, along with a small hand pump and needle. Also in the box are a small but otherwise traditional remote control—required to do anything with the Huupe—and a USB-C charger and lengthy cable so you can top up the battery without removing it from the door. After a quick charge, the unit is ready to set up. I was surprised to discover there’s no app for the device; while larger Huupe hardware works with one, the Mini 2 is completely self-contained and web-based. Just connect the backboard to your Wi-Fi network through a process that you step through with the remote, just like you would on any modern television. What’s new vs. the original Huupe Mini? According to the company, most of the upgrades are behind the scenes: a faster CPU, a larger battery (rated lifespan is now four hours), better display quality, and “significantly” better shot tracking. New games are also included, which I’ll cover in the sections to come. Dunkin’ Photograph: Christopher Null Once connected to the web, the Huupe Mini 2 opens up a world of entertainment to you, and, to my great surprise, not all of it is basketball-related. At first blush, the options available are actually quite daunting. It’s all arranged into traditional tiles on the home screen, which you scroll through with the remote. Just Huupe is the board’s most basic scoring system, tracking shots and recording your shooting percentage in an untimed session. If you want to get competitive, Huupe Live and the Daily Prize Challenge are social games where you challenge players worldwide to score the most points in a given time frame. The winner gets a nominal prize—10 bucks for the daily challenge, a “cozy sweatsuit” for a monthlong challenge. Other games are fairly self-explanatory, like Most 3 Pointers in 90 Seconds and Family Mode (basically Horse). Many of the games require online friends to play against; if you don’t have pals with their own Huupe Minis, you’ll probably be locked out of these modes—not that they add much beyond their multiplayer features. Things get a little kookier—and buggier—from there. For example, Huupe Flyers is designed to be played without a ball. It’s a gesture-based version of Flappy Bird, wherein you literally flap your arms around to keep a basketball in the air, tracking your movements via the camera much like an Xbox Kinect . Unfortunately, unlike the ball-based games, I was never able to play it, as it failed the calibration process every time I tried to fire it up. The system also works as a fairly straightforward streaming platform. Included are apps for YouTube, HBO Max, ESPN, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Spotify, and more. There’s one glaring omission in that list, of course, and I’m not talking about Paramount+ but rather Netflix. Without Netflix support, can you even call yourself a streaming device? It’s also worth noting that the built-in speakers are surprisingly weak. On some apps the audio is OK; on others it’s nearly inaudible. Photograph: Christopher Null The Fade Away The Huupe Mini 2 includes not just a sensor that can detect when a basket is successfully made; it also includes a camera to track how far the shooter is from the backboard. This is used to assign point values to various shots (depending on the specific game you’re playing), with more points earned the farther away you are from the hoop. The good news is that in weeks of playing on the Huupe Mini 2, I never noticed a time when a successful basket was recorded as a miss or vice versa. The distance calculation, however, is another thing. I’ve shot from across the room and had it count as 1 point, while some shots from just a few feet away ring up as 3 points. I could never figure out much rhyme or reason for this variability, except that shots straight-on to the backboard generally registered as lower point values, even if they were distant, while shots from the wings earned more. Of course, navigating all of this is highly dependent on the geometry of your room. Unless you have the Huupe Mini 2 set up in an empty garage, you are probably, like me, going to have plenty of obstacles that get in the way of a lot of your shots—and plenty of crawling under furniture to retrieve wayward balls. Out of Bounds I can say with authority that it is harder to make a basket on the Huupe Mini 2 than on a regulation basketball goal, even at a very close distance. The hoop is small, and the ball tends to rebound wildly off the springy backboard. It’s quite unforgiving, and it didn’t really make me want to spend a lot of time playing, chasing balls that bounced into the corner or rolled under the bed. The other big problem: When the included inflatable ball hits the Huupe Mini 2, the impact is extremely loud, to the point where I was promptly informed by my wife that it was not appropriate for use when anyone else was in the house. While Huupe says the device is intended solely for use with the included ball, I found a workaround by purchasing a 5-inch foam basketball from Amazon, which makes a bit less noise on impact and also softens the rebound a bit. It has had zero trouble registering baskets. Battery life is another issue. While four hours is plenty of playing time, the battery continues to drain when the Huupe is in standby mode, which meant I would play a few games in the morning, ostensibly shut the Huupe off, then come back in the afternoon to a completely dead device. The Huupe can run with the power cord attached, but only once the battery has charged to at least about 5 percent. Unfortunately, even turning the power off is puzzlingly difficult. The power button on my remote control did nothing; I ultimately had to turn the system on and off with the physical button on the bottom of the backboard. At $429 (on deep discount from a hefty list price of $799), the Huupe Mini 2 sits perhaps just over the edge of what might pass for a quirky holiday gift—and I think it’s safe to say no one is buying this device for themselves. You’d have to be a huge basketball nut to get enough mileage out of the device to make it worthwhile. I expect you would also have to loa