MWC 2014: HTC Desire 816 hands-on

Introduction

HTC played to its strengths with the two devices unveiled at the MWC – the Desire 816 phablet and Desire 610 smartphone. Both look hot and feature LTE connectivity and BoomSound speakers.
The HTC Desire 816 is a 5.5" phablet, "one of the best value smartphones ever introduced by HTC" says the company. LTE is welcome and the 13MP camera is nice to have. A 5MP front-facing camera with a BSI sensor will probably produce some of the better selfies this side of the Oppo N1.


The HTC Desire 610 is a smaller device, with a 4.7" qHD screen. The Desire 610 has an 8MP camera and is powered by a Snapdragon 400 chipset. It has a fairly large battery too, at 2,400mAh, which surprisingly has just a little less capacity than that of the phablet.


Go onto the next page to find the Desire 816 hands-on. We're still on the lookout for the Desire 610 to give it a full hands-on treatment.

HTC Desire 816 hands-on

HTC's latest mid-range offering in the face of the Desire 816 can easily be described with one word - delightful. To begin with, it's a very handsome 5.5" phablet boasting similar looks to the company's flagship, the HTC One.
Naturally, being a mid-range offering, the Desire 816 is built with plastic, which thankfully is soft touch and feels great. And just like the One, the Desire 816 features stereo front-facing speakers. We tested them out and even in the loud MWC environment, they were excellent.

The 720p display is also excellent. We are particularly impressed with the wide viewing angles making the phablet perfect for sharing media with friends.
The Desire 816 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor with a 1.6GHz quad-core CPU and Adreno 305 GPU. The 1.5GB of RAM will allow trouble-free multi-tasking, while the 8GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD, will try and fit in all your content.

On paper, the Desire 816 runs Android 4.4 KitKat with Sense 5.5 UI on top. However, we weren't allowed to photograph the UI as the phone will be launching with a newer version of Sense, which the company is still brushing up.
However, the version of Sense which was running, albeit not the latest, was running plenty fast on the Snapdragon 400 CPU. Web browsing was great, too. We are confident the Desire 816 will make for a great multimedia consumption device, but we do hope HTC gets the pricing right when the phone launches in April.