HTC Desire 616 Review

HTC Desire 616 is one of those phones that is caught between ongoing war between local Indian smartphone manufacturers and Chinese smartphone manufacturers. They are both trying their best to gather as much ground as possible with aggressive pricing in India. If this HTC Device was launched say like 6 months before at the same price. It might have been a big hit. But now it feels like a stale product. It gives, been there done that kind of feel. Even the term “octa-core” doesn’t sound exciting anymore. All thanks to brands of our own and neighbour country that are spoiling us.

Hardware/Design

If there’s one thing you can count on from a brand like HTC, it’s build quality. HTC Desire 616 is such a sturdy device and it is one of the smallest smartphone with a 5 inch screen. The front and sides are of matte finish while the back is made of glossy plastic. The front gives Desire 616 a premium feel. It’s only 9.2mm thick. It’s neither unnecessarily thin nor unnecessarily thick. It just feels right in hands. It is one of the best smartphone with a 5 inch screen that i have held in my hands design wise. It doesn’t have notification LED.

Screen

HTC Desire 616 comes with a 5 inch IPS LCD display of 720p resolution. Technically you can’t call it HD because some part of the screen is always used by on screen buttons. The screen is nice, viewing angles are great as expected from an IPS display. It’s got a little yellowish tint. Colour saturation is very warm. The colours doesn’t pop out of the screen on to your face, they are very easy on your eyes. Still the screen looks vibrant enough. All in all it’s a very decent display.

Camera

Still image camera quality of HTC Desire 616 is not that good. The pictures most of the time come out a little blurry and full of noise. The image lacks details. And the colours doesn’t look that good either. The camera does comes with auto-focus and touch to focus both. And also up-to 4x digital zoom. You can also take photos while shooting a video. Video quality is better than its still image quality. It can shoot videos up-to full HD resolution and the video clarity is pretty great. Video sample is in the review video below. For the price though one’d expect better still image quality.

Multimedia

HTC Desire 616 comes with two music players one is very old gingerbread or should i say default android music player and the other one is Google’s play music. Doesn’t matter which one you play music on it’s going to sound same because there could be two software but the hardware is still one. Although both comes with its own sound effects that means you can set different EQ on each. That way they will both sound different.

Anyway, the music quality is very good through earphones, sound is very clear and distortion free. If you use ‘good-enough’ headphones/earphones. It might sound even better. The external speaker could have been more louder though. In noisy places you won’t even be able to hear the ringtone, it’s that weak.

Video playback is good. It can play 1080p videos in its default video player without any lags. I went further ahead and tried 4k video on it since it contains an ‘octa core’ processor and all. Turns out it can’t play it in its default video player. It simply says ‘file not supported’ by the way the file i was trying to play was a simple MP4 file you can see it in the video below. Although it can play 4k video with the help of MX player ad its s/w decoder. But the video would still be choppy and keeps losing sound. This chipset is not ready for 4k content yet, it seems.

OS/RAM/Storage

HTC Desre 616 comes with Android 4.2.2 JellyBean and there’s no mention of KitKat update from HTC. It comes with a customized UI which is not HTC Sense. It is like a further customized version of sense. It does comes with HTC Blinkfeed though. It comes with HTC Sense keyboard which is horrible to type at. It’s so flat and not very sensitive, the keys are unnecessarily wide and flat. It has 1GB of RAM out of which you’d get around 300MB free and 4GB of internal memory out of which you’d get around 1.28GB for use. It does support micro SD card up-to 32GB and also all the storage related features like move to SD and default write disk.

Performance

The Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset on which HTC Desire 616 runs on contain 8 Cortex A7 CPUs each clocked(or rather down clocked) at 1.4GHz and Mali 450MP GPU. Sounds enough to run a phone like Desire 616 smoothly but there’s one little problem. It’s the RAM, sometimes it gets filled very quickly and hence the UI or the apps you are using starts to stutter. Happens occasionally but still pretty annoying. Since the RAM is only 1GB out of which you won’t even get 400MB, You’ve gotta kill apps more frequently if you want the phone to run smooth.

Although once you are in a game that needs all that juice, the chipset truly shows its colours and starts to deliver. It handles most of the games pretty easily. Even the most graphic intensive games run on it pretty much lag-free.

Connectivity/Call quality

HTC Desire 616 is a dual sim device. It supports one regular size ‘mini’ sim and one ‘micro’ sim. The WiFi connectivity of the device is decent it doesn’t lose signal that easily. And at full bars the speed is very good.
It also comes with Bluetooth 4.0, wireless display/cast screen option. Call quality is decent the ear piece is pretty big in size so you won’t have any problems hearing the person. The mic is loud and clear.

Battery

Battery of HTC Desire 616 is 2000mAh Li-Polymer type. Now it’s pretty hard to tell about the battery life beause each person uses its phone differently and battery life solely depends on how you use your phone. But to give you an idea i can tell you that while i was making my gaming video i checked the battery at the start and at the end of the video and the results were battery percentage was down to 81% from 98% in half an hour.

By the way company suggested 3G talk-time is 14 hours. Which you are never going to get. Maximum you can get is around 8 hours i.e, on very minimal use. If you are going to use it to continuously play games or watch videos on it with WiFi on then expect a battery life of around 4-5 hours.

Verdict/Choice

So, what did i like about this phone? I liked its music quality, build quality and screen quality. What did i not like? It’s camera quality, speaker quality and low amount of RAM. Well, the score is 3-3 that makes it even. I could add keyboard in what i didn’t like but that’s really a minor issue and you can also easily change it in the settings.

HTC Desire 616 is really that kind of a phone that i tried so hard to like, but i just couldn’t. It gave no reason to like it. But the thing is i also couldn’t dislike it either. Even i am confused whether to recommend this phone to anyone or not. The price point it’s available at, it seems like an isolated case. No phone with such a chipset is available at that price from brands like Samsung or Sony. But there are plenty of phones available from local brands for more or less the same price. And its better if you go for local brands at such a price because you’d get better value for money. This phone except for that octa core processor it has nothing special.

But i still couldn’t advice against it. Because it is still better than most of Sony and Samsung phones that comes with that pathetic Snapdragon 400 chipset. Seems like this is one of the case, in which you’ve really gotta make the decision yourself. The choice is really yours this time. If you have any queries about this phone i can help you with that though. Just type your questions in the comments below.