Htc Desire 310 Short & Sweet Review

Htc desire 310 left a lot of things to desire. It’s like Htc has taken the name literally. There’s not a lot to write about this phone. As it has no special features, actually apart from its price it has nothing that i can call special. I thought it’s special because this phone might have been the first from Htc to have 1GB RAM with a really affordable price. But i am proven wrong. Thanks snapdeal partially for that. They stated specs wrong in their description of the phone. As a result of that i am stuck with a phone with 512MB RAM. But anyway that’s not the only problem this phone has and apart from that it has some very few good points too. I am going to tell you about both in this review.

Hardware & Design

It is made of plastic with a pebble like design. Phone feels solid though thanks to Htc build quality. But it still looks and feels very cheap in hand, thanks to the plastic build. Its bezels are unnecessarily wide as the screen is only 4.5 inches, the bezels aren’t supposed to be this wide. Phone is 11.3mm thick, a bit on the thicker side. It’s 68mm wide and 132mm tall. It doesn’t have a dedicated camera button. Phone feels very light in hand.

Display

It has 4.5 inches display and it is very bad. It’s a TFT LCD panel with horrible viewing angles and a resolution of 854x480px. It doesn’t have any kind of protection, say gorilla glass on top of it. It only has that normal plastic like very soft and cheap glass on top of it. It has pixel density of 218ppi.

Camera

Camera is also one of the things that comes under vast list of problems that this phone has. It’s not like the camera doesn’t work. It does work. But it doesn’t even have touch to focus or auto focus, it’s fixed focus camera with a resolution of 5MP. It doesn’t have LED flash. The image quality is very bad, it’s full of distortion and colour reproduction is also pretty bad, you can see yourself in the image samples below. It has all the default jelly bean camera features like white balance, HDR, scene selection, face detection and so on.

The only good thing it has is full HD recording but then again it only records in 3GP format, it also has EIS for video recording. It has a function called “video highlight”. What it does is, it makes a automated video out of your still images and adds sound effects and video effects automatically, one of the good features that this phone has, you can see it in the action in the review video below. It also has a VGA front camera, which is just there for the name’s sake. Full HD video sample is in the review video below.

Multimedia

Htc didn’t even bother to give a customized music player for this phone. They just put the very old ginger bread music player in it. Although it also comes with Google Play Music app pre installed. It doesn’t matter though the music quality in earphones is pretty bad the best i could call it is average. Even its external loudspeaker is pretty weak. It does have a default jelly bean equalizer.

It doesn’t have a dedicated video player, to play videos you either have to download a video player from the play store or just use the gallery player. It can play full HD video by default though.

Storage

Another weak point of this phone. It has only 1.8GB memory available for the user and even worse only 512MB RAM. It doesn’t have ‘move to sd’ feature. You can select internal storage or micro sd card to store stuff, because this phone has ‘preferred write location’ option, in the storage settings but don’t get excited because you can’t store app data on the sd card anyway that option is only for saving multimedia, like photos, videos.

Os & Connectivity

It runs on Android jelly bean 4.2.2 with customized sense 5.1 UI on top of it. It also has blinkfeed. A mobile data hungry and useless feature if you ask me. Connectivity wise it has wifi, dual sim, Bluetooth 4.0. Wifi range is pretty good. It doesn’t support USB OTG. And dual sim is always a welcome feature for Indian consumers. It is dual standby by the way. The call quality is good through the ear piece. It’s very loud and clear without much distortion.

Price to performance ratio

Price of this phone is well under budget level but the bar of the performance has been raised by somewhat similarly priced phones like Sony Xperia M and Motorola G. This phone has quadcore Cortex A7 CPU with Mali 400MP2 GPU, Mediatek MTK 6582M chipset. Which is powerful enough but 512MB RAM is such a bottleneck for this phone. If you couple the same chipset with 1GB RAM it will become a real performer. Phone works really smooth once you to take it out of the box but as the memory(RAM) starts filling up because of temporary app data it starts starts lagging and freezing, so the performance falls automatically.

Battery life

Battery life of this phone is good, it has 2000mAh battery. It has very good battery management for example if you turn your mobile data/3G/wifi off at night. Next morning you will find the battery at the same level you left it last night. Most Android phones loses battery even when in idle state. So that’s another good thing this phone has. If you play games like Asphalt 8 continuously on it then it will lose the battery faster and also gets a little warm around the back. With continuous gaming and web browsing it will last you around 6 hours, but with casual use it will easily last you 10 hours or one whole day.

Choice

Here comes the choice part which could be very difficult for some people. Let me make it easy for you. Don’t buy this phone simple as that. Even if you like HTC a lot, just don’t. It does not worth the money. Even the phones made by Indian and Chinese companies around same price range are better than this. At least they have 1GB of RAM which is like a fundamental need of an Android phone. Review video is below.