As you people may have already know by now that HTC Desire 516 is the cheapest smartphone from HTC with a 5 inch screen. It also has a quadcore processor by the way. It looks good, isn’t it? Just stick a quadcore moniker with a phone and it suddenly becomes desirable. The people that buy these phones don’t even know what they are buying. They just fall for the advertising. But then again, it’s all business. You can’t blame anybody but yourself.Everything is fair in War & Business. This review could help to decide whether you should buy this smartphone or not though.
Hardware/Design
HTC Desire 516 is made of glossy platic. I used the one that has white back. There’s also a black one. The device despite of having 5 inch screen is quite easy to hold. Because it’s not ridiculously thin and wide. It’s thickness is just about right. It’s 9.7mm thick to be exact and it weighs 160g a bit on the heavy side but not much. The device feels very solid in hands. The design is same old rectangular slab. How else can you design a smartphone whose main form of input is a touch screen? You can’t. Let’s just live with rectangles for now. It doesn’t have a dedicated camera button and notification LED.
Display
HTC Desire 516 has a 5 inch screen LCD display of qHD resolution. And the screen quality is pretty good for the price. According to antutu device info. It’s either an SLCD or AMOLED display. Antutu wasn’t sure itself. But whatever it is the screen is indeed very good for the price. It’s viewing angles are great and colour reproduction is good too. On full brightness it’s sunlight readability is good.
Camera
Well, still image quality of HTC Desire 516’s camera is somewhat decent. But video quality is very bad. It can only take videos of 720p resolution and the format of the videos will be MP4. You can take photos and videos simultaneously on it. To know how just watch the review video below.
The images taken with the camera aren’t that great either. But they are still of decent quality. As you can see in the gallery below. Photos taken inside are full of noise but photos taken outside in daylight/overcast conditions are kind of good. You can see some details in them too. For the record HTC Desire 516 has a 5MP camera with LED Flash and 2MP front camera.
Multimedia
Music quality of this phone is very good in headphones/earphones. It’s very clear and even at full volume it doesn’t sounds like it’s trying to tear your ear drums. It’s very clean there’s no distortion at all in the music. The bass is good but doesn’t overshadow the other instruments. It’s very balanced i was actually surprised after hearing it for the first time. For 13,000 Rupees that’s quality.
Just if the external was also that good. It is every weak. Even at full volume you can barely hear from distance it’s that bad. It can play videos up-to 1080p in its default video player with occasional stuttering. But it’s negligible. You can see the video playback in the review video below.
Storage/RAM/OS
This phone comes with a 4GB of total internal storage out of which something around 1.8 GB is available for the user to use. You can expand it up-to 32GB with the help of micro sd card. 1GB of RAM out of which around 400MB is free for the user apps, rest is used by the OS. And If you don’t know yet this phone doesn’t support ‘move to sd’ and ‘preferred to install location’ features. Which is a bad move by HTC. It does not support USB OTG.
It runs on Android version 4.3 Jellybean with HTC Sense 5.1 on top of it and also it comes with HTC blinkfeed. The operating system runs smooth most of the time. Although it crashed as in restarted itself automatically while i was using the camera so that’s something. It’s Android after all. But that happened only once though. Didn’t happen again. Just a rare event i guess.
Performance
Performance wise, you can’t expect much from Snapdragon 200 chipset. In other words HTC Desire 516 runs on quadcore Cortex A7 processor clocked at 1.2GHz and Adreno 305GPU(according to antutu). OS/UI performance was good it was smooth without any stuttering or lag. Thanks to HTC’ optimization. But gaming performance of this phone lacks because of two reasons. First being the storage restrictions and second is weak chipset. So, i wouldn’t call the performance good of this phone.
Connectivity/Call quality
Connectivity wise HTC Desire 516 is dual sim device with support of two full size sims. Yes you can use mini sim in this phone. It also has 2G/GSM only. A feature that saves a lot of battery. The WiFi of this phone after properly connected and something not downloading in the background is pretty fast and range is good too. Apart from all that it also has Bluetooth 4.0. Call quality is loud and clear.
Battery
Since the chipset HTC Desire 516 runs on isn’t that power hungry. The battery life of this phone is not a problem. You can easily use it for a day(8 hours) without charging on normal use. The battery is of 1950mAh by the way. Since you won’t be able to install and play many big games on this phone. You won’t be able to drain your battery pretty fast. And still, if you are determined to drain your battery in 5-6 hours? Just play Real Racing 3 or Asphalt 8 continuously on it with WiFi on and you will end up with ‘Please charge your device’ message in no time. Hope i helped(in teaching you how to drain your battery fast).
Verdict/Choice
My verdict is a straight no for this device. When i unboxed this phone i compared it the success of Nokia XL but there’s a difference in Nokia XL’s price and HTC Desire 516 difference. Desire 516 costs more than 10,000 Rupees(13,000-14,000 Rupees/$216) to be exact. And yet it still doesn’t come with a basic feature like ‘move to sd’.
I thought this phone is going to sell well because it has a 5 inch screen, 1GB RAM, quadcore processor, What else does anybody want from a phone under 15,000 Rupees especially from an International brand like HTC? But HTC messed up by putting storage restrictions on this phone.
If you want a smartphone with 5 inch screen under 15,000 Rupees from HTC only. Then you can buy this phone. Otherwise there are lot of other options available in the market best according to me is Sony Xperia C if you want a phone with 5 inch screen only. It is a little old but still better than this HTC Desire 516 in every department except for the screen. Since Xperia C has a TFT display. There are plethora of other Indian/Chinese company branded smartphones. Choice is yours.