HTC Desire 526G+ Review

You know it’s kind of hard to find a notable flaw in this device. It’s not like it is perfect. And neither everything in this phone is of top notch quality. But considering this phone is available for 10,000 Rupees/$160 approx only. This is, as ‘top notch’ as you could get. Besides, at this price range You can’t nit-pick anyway.

Hardware & Design

HTC Desire 526G+ is made of glossy plastic. It’s available in two colours black and white. I got the white one as you can see in the photo above. White one also has dual tone colours. White & Blue. Build quality is kind of loose, you can hear it creaks around the volume button sometimes. Apart from that though, i didn’t notice anything else regarding build quality. It does not have notification LED.

Design wise. Well it’s pretty good for one hand use and it is a lot close to oval shape than rectangle like most of the HTC phones. Its screen area is a little raised above the rest of the body. Which is good and bad both. Because, if the device falls on either of its sides, not much harm is going to happen to the screen. But if it ever falls face first, then the screen will shatter. Don’t want to scare you, but that’s just how the design of this phone is. It is only 9.9mm thick and weighs 154 grams.

Display

HTC Desire 526G+ comes with 4.7 inch LCD display whether it’s IPS or not, that is not mentioned anywhere. But since it has good viewing angles i guess it is. The resolution of the screen is qHD. Colour reproduction is also good. But again just like Desire 620G it’s not that bright. HTC’s displays are just not that bright. Especially around this price range. Still, it has manageable sunlight readability. And lastly this display size is very good for one hand use.

Multimedia

Unlike HTC Desire 620G, this phone has quite good music quality in ear phones. And it improves a lot if you tinker around equalizer a little. That little distortion at high volumes which is a specialty of HTC phones around this price range is still there though. But it’s much less. And if you use equalizer properly, you could get rid of it. Just like any other phone with this octa core Mediatek chipset. This phone also can not play 4K and 2K content properly. It plays full HD videos without a hitch though. It has a single speaker. It is loud but it lacks depth and quality.

Camera

This phone has 8MP rear facing camera with LED flash. It has auto focus and touch to focus both. Image quality is decent in good lighting conditions. But reduce the intensity of this light and the quality of the camera will reduce with it. In low light condition, without flash it doesn’t pick up any details, mess up the colours, all in all it takes a very bad image. But with flash on. The image quality improves a lot. Almost like night and day difference. You can see that in the photos below. You can also take photos while shooting video. It can record full HD videos but quality is not that good because of 3GP format. For selfies it has 2MP front facing camera. Which can also shoot videos upto 720p. Video sample is in the review video below and below are some shots.

OS/Storage/RAM

HTC Desire 526G+ runs on Android version 4.4.2 with HTC UI on top. Which is not Sense UI. But if you’d like to call it that, you are free to do so. It also comes with ‘HTC Blinkfeed’. It comes with 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 600MB free. And due to this. This phone remains smooth most of the time and hardly ever lags or stutter. Thus making the overall OS performance very good.

It comes with two storage options 8GB and 16GB. There’s a thousand Rupees difference between both versions. You can also expand it further via micro SD card. I am reviweing the 8GB version. It comes with around 4GB memory free. And that’s all you are going to get for apps/games. So, use it wisely. This phone doesn’t have ‘preferred install location’ and ‘move to SD’ options. This is like the only flaw or you could say complain that one could have with this phone.

Performance

The price to performance ratio of HTC Desire 526G+ is very good. All thanks to proper RAM management and Mediatek MT 6592 performing as it should. If you don’t know, here’s some info about this chipset. It consists of octa-core Cortex A7 processors clocked at 1.7GHz and Mali 450MP4 GPU. A deadly combination at this price. I don’t know the proper reason. Maybe it is qHD resolution or some tweaking that HTC might have done with this phone and its processor. But because of that ‘whatever reason’ out of all the phones, i have used with this chipset, this one has beaten them all in performance. And the best part is phones with this specific chipset are used to get hot a little, but this one hardly ever get warm. Even while playing graphic intensive games, it remains in the ‘warm’ region and never gets to the ‘hot’ region. So, i must say i am happy with this phone’s performance especially at this price.

Update: It does get a little hot around its camera section when playing latest android games from Google Play. Only during some games though. One such game is ‘ICC Pro Cricket 2015″. It still doesn’t get hot during normal phone operations or while playing games in PPSSPP.

Connectivity

The volume from the ear piece of this phone is quite low. And it sounds like it is a mono speaker. Sometimes it sounds like something is blocking the sound. Mic work fine though. I know because at least i didn’t have to shout while talking on this phone. It is a dual sim device. It takes two micro SIMs. Other connectivity options are 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and cast screen.
This phone does not support USB OTG.

Battery life

HTC is suggesting around 15 hours of talk-time on this phone. It has 2000 mAh battery by the way. So looking at that number. I wouldn’t stretch it that much. And i will keep my ‘suggested battery life’ realistic. You can expect around 10 hours of battery life from this phone on normal use. In other words it could easily last you a day or moderate use. It also has power saving mode. It will save your battery life at the cost of slightly reduced performance. And if you are continuously going to play games on it with WiFi on then it is going to last around 5 hours. Realistic. Remember.

Verdict

My verdict is very simple. If you are one of those that don’t like companies like Micromax, Intex, Karbonn, Xolo or any other local brand in your country. But still want a very good performing phone under a light budget then this is like the only choice you’ve got. Since companies like Sony, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Microsoft/Nokia doesn’t have a single smartphone that could compete with this phone’s price and performance. It’s only competition are smartphones from local brands. And, if you are okay with those companies then the choice is yours. But, regardless of the company/brand/manufacture HTC Desire 526G+ is a very good phone available at a very good starting price.