HTC Desire 816: mid-range phablet goodness

Details: WhaTech Channel: Mobile Reviews; Published: Wednesday, 05 March 2014 09:40; Submitted by Eza Ezamie; News from: Eza Ezamie; Read: 10 times

desire 816 photo Introducing HTC Desire 816, a phablet that has all the premium look and feel but won't break your bank like a flagship would. It's like you get the best of both worlds between performance and value while still maintaining the premium feel of the HTC One which won the Mobile World Congress 2014 Best Smartphone.

Building on the success of the HTC One, here comes the Desire 816 to fill in the gap between flagship and mid-range and this phone might just be the answer you're looking for.

With a 5.5-inch capacitive touchscreen delivering you 720 x 1280 pixels or ~267 ppi pixel density, it definitely falls under the mid-range market with good performance overall. There's also the HTC Sense UI 5.5 to give you the one of the best user experience.

Under the hood of the Desire 816 is Qualcomm MSM8928 Snapdragon 400 chipset, a Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A7 processor, Adreno 305 GPU plus 1.5GB RAM which is definitely mid-range but somewhere higher up. This ensures sufficient raw processing power for you to power up any latest apps or games that's out there. Multi-tasking will also work wonderfully well here.

The primary camera gets a huge boost with a 13 Megapixel, 4160 x 3120 pixels, with autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, simultaneous HD video and image recording and HDR. This ensures beautiful cameras while you're on the go to capture those special moments in life. With the rather generous 5 Megapixel secondary camera, it does makes for an interesting camera phone.

Although there's no official announcement on which OS that it will use, expect it to start with Jelly Bean and the upgrade to KitKat could be either through the official way or via modding which is quite popular, although the risk of bricking your phone is always there.

With an 8GB internal storage, there's also an option for expansion with a microSD slot which can provide up to 64GB of additional storage.

Battery-wise, it uses a non-removable Li-Po 2600 mAh battery which is considered to be sufficient for a day's usage based on the screen resolution and the power that it has. Anyway, there's always the option of a powerbank for you to charge while on the go.

As with any other medium to high-end HTC phones, there's dual-frontal speakers and HTC BoomSound that boosts audio performance with the full sound you've grown to love on the HTC One. Then there's HTC Blinkfeed which allows you to build your own home screen by populating it with information and updates that you want so that you're always up-to-date.

To sum it up, HTC Desire 816 shines in so many ways. Riding on the success of the HTC One, first of all there's the premium look and feel to it. Performance-wise, it should be more than what the average user might come to expect in running daily apps and games. For photography lovers, the generous primary and secondary camera could easily replace your need for a digital camera. It really is hard to find its flaws here.

The HTC Desire 816 which is expected to be launched by end of March although there's no official word yet on the price. Expect it to be slightly higher than the average for a mid-range. The phone will be available in black, white, red, gray and green.