HTC Desire 620G Review

I don’t know what to write about this phone anymore. I bought it solely because i thought it comes with full HTC Sense 6.0 now that i know, it doesn’t. There’s really not much difference left between this phone and HTC Desire 616. You can also compare it with Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime as it comes with a front 5 MP camera. But then again, it’s not really a selfie camera. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad camera. Its just it does not have the same features as a selfie camera. Even the octa core Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset isn’t that special anymore. As it is easily available in phones below 10,000 Rupees or approx $160 USD. Anyway for the extra price you are going to get HTC’s name and quality if nothing else.

Hardware

Like i said in my unboxing video. HTC Desire 620G looks like an exact replica of HTC Desire 820. From glossy plastic build to dual tone colours. Its build quality just like 820 is very solid. It is not a unibody phone though. The battery of this phone is removable. It is 9.6mm thick and weighs 160 grams. Believe it or not but this phone is thicker than HTC Desire 616. Not by much but still. One thing hardware wise which Desire 820 have but Desire 620G doesn’t is a Notification LED.

Display

HTC Desire 620G comes with 5 inch HD display whether it is IPS or TFT or SuperLCD type that is unknown. But one thing i can tell you is regardless of whatever type it is. It has got pretty good viewing angles and colour reproduction. It is not that bright though. Even at full brightness and automatic brightness off, it feels dull. Sunlight readability at full brightness isn’t that good either. Overall it is a pretty average display.

Multimedia

HTC Desire 620G does not have boom sound speakers. It is HTC’s clever placement of the speaker and ear piece which makes it look like it has boom sound speaker. It has only one speaker at the bottom. And the quality of that speaker is quite good. It’s pretty loud. The only issue i had with it, is its clarity. It creates a distorting noise sometimes while playing music at high volume. This phone’s music quality in earphones is not good at all. It feels pretty dull and lifeless. And even at full volume it doesn’t get that loud. And the worst part is it almost has zero bass. It does come with an equalizer so you can customize it but it wont affect the quality that much. Just like any other phone with the same chipset this phone can also play 1080p videos without any issues in its default player.

Camera

HTC Desire 620G comes with 8MP rear facing camera with touch to focus/auto focus both and LED flash. It also comes with 5MP front camera. The quality of both is quite ‘real’. Real as in it takes photo with pretty exact details like in real life. Especially its front camera. Most phones that comes with 5MP or more resolution front camera are considered as ‘selfie’ phones in this day and age. But this phone’s front camera does not take fake photos. It will capture your face as it is. It won’t make it shine. It does come with something called ‘beauty face’. You can use it if you want but don’t blame me if your photos come out looking abnormal because of it. All in all if you like Grand Prime’s selfie camera then you’ll probably wont like this one as it shows the reality. The back camera of this phone takes very good photos in good lighting conditions. But in bad light or low light the quality degrades a lot and it picks up a lot of noise and doesn’t pick up that much details or light. As you can see in the photos below. Both the cameras can take videos up-to 1080p a sample of which is in the review video below, the quality is not that good because the format is 3GP only.

OS/RAM/Storage

It comes with Android version 4.4.2 with some kind of custom HTC Skin on top of it. It is not sense. This phone does not come with any sort Sense. If you know what i mean. Anyway, RAM of this phone is 1GB out of which you’ll get around 400MB free. And still the phone lags/stutter and gets stuck sometimes. Even during simple tasks such as copy pasting files from one folder to another it starts lagging. These random slow downs does not happen often they only happen during multitasking. This phone comes with 8GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get around 4.3GB free and here’s the interesting part it does not have move to SD or preferred install location function. Which means you are stuck with 4.3GB of storage for apps and games. At this point it feels like HTC actually made this phone worse than HTC Desire 616 which is available for much cheaper than this phone. This phone does support USB OTG.

Price To Performance Ratio

HTC Desire 620G comes with Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset which contains 8 Cortex A7 processors clocked at 1.7 GHz and Mali 450MP4 GPU. Looks quite decent. But here’s the thing. This chipset has become quite old now. Its performance is still pretty good when compared to similarly priced phones with Snapdragon chipsets. But when you compare it with other phones with the same chipset you’ll find that this phone looks expensive. They could’ve justified the price if they have given the full HTC Sense with this phone but they didn’t. So now its nothing different from any other phone with Mediatek chipset from local brands. Even the old HTC Desire 616 has the same chipset just underclocked to 1.4 Ghz but that didn’t affects its performance much. But its lower price could compensate for that. HTC Desire 620G doesn’t even have that.

Connectivity

The only thing you are going to miss out if you buy Desire 620G instead of Desire 620 is 4G. Apart from that it has all the rest of the connectivity option like dual SIM, 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0. WiFi of this phone is quite fast and doesn’t lose connectivity even if you leave it to download apps during all night. Call quality from both ear piece and mic is loud and clear. It also has cast screen option.

Battery

The battery of this phone is of 2100 mAh. It last up-to 7-8 hours on normal use and around 4-5 hours during gaming. It comes with an option to turn off the high frequency use of CPU when not needed to save battery life. But turning that option on could affect the performance of the phone. Although With that option on and brightness set to less than medium this phone can also last all day on very moderate use.

Verdict/Choice

Here’s the perfect example of choice. I bought this phone, i made a choice. I bought it solely because i thought it’s going to come with full HTC Sense 6.0 but now that it doesn’t. It does not have anything to differentiate itself from other phones with Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset. If i knew that this phone is not going to come with HTC Sense i wouldn’t have bought it. Because there’s already a phone like like that in the market it’s called HTC Desire 616. 5MP front camera and 8GB internal storage is not that much of an upgrade. Its not even a selfie camera. Those of you looking to buy this or Galaxy Grand Prime, beware that this phone’s 5MP front camera is not a proper selfie camera. It is not going to make you glow. Don’t blame me if you buy it and get scared by looking at your own ‘real’ face. You can buy this phone if you want an affordable HTC phone with 5MP front camera and decent performance than an average selfie phone. Otherwise you could find many smartphones with better or similar specs from local brands at much cheaper price. Choice will always be yours.