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.