HTC Desire 820 Review – Pretty Good

HTC Desire 820 is a very good update over HTC Desire 816. Which should have been never launched around Rs. 25,000 in the first place. It was just the matter of chip-set in case of HTC Desire 816 too, i mean like how could they launch such a good phone with such a pathetic chip-set and then ask a premium price for it? I just can’t get it out of my head. But anyway, that’s past now. And HTC has done a very good job with its successor HTC Desire 820. That’s all that matters.

Build Quality

You can not take out the battery of HTC Desire 820. It’s a uni-body phone. And it’s made of glossy plastic. Glossy but very tough and sturdy. The front has some kind of protective glass whether it is gorilla glass or some other glass that is not mentioned anywhere so i can’t confirm it. It is very slim only 7.7mm thick and light-weight, weighs only 155 grams. It is little wide for one hand use but if you have big hands then you’d be fine with it. HTC could trim those bezels a little though. They are unnecessarily this big. It comes in dual-tone colours. It does have a notification LED below its front camera it glows in orange colour.

Display

HTC Desire 820’s 5.5 inch display is decent. Not that great but still good. It is best when looked head front. You start tilting it and it starts loosing colours a little. For example the photo below the heading, wallpaper in that photo is of cyan colour but it looks a little blue/teal because of the tilt angle. It’s not like it loses colour completely like TFT displays but still it has a little bluish tint when you look at it from an angle. Nothing major. It is Super LCD 2 type display of HD resolution. And when looked head front it displays pretty crisp and colourful imagery.

Camera

HTC Desire 820 comes 13MP rear facing camera with auto-focus and touch to focus both but it doesn’t always focus properly resulting in making the image blurry. It comes with a 8MP front facing camera or ‘Selfie’ camera. It even come with a digital ‘make up’ function built in-to camera settings. Really. The front camera also have a slider with which you can choose how much whitewashed you want to look in your selfie. You can see it in the review video below.

The rear/main/primary camera performance is not that good of this phone. Especially indoors. At this price the camera should take photos with much less noise and quality degradation. But it doesn’t. The moment you zoom in-to the photo you can see the degradation in quality. And then there’s that focus problem. It does some plus points though. For instance, If you could manage to make it focus properly on the object before taking the photo it could take a very good photo. And it takes very good photos outdoors. With pretty accurate colours and details.

It can shoot video up-to 1080p and you can take photos while shooting video. it also have features like split photo with which you can take photo from its back camera and front camera at the same time and it will merge it to make one photo. You can see that in the review video below along with 1080p video sample. And also some still samples below.

OS/Storage/RAM

HTC Desire 820 runs on Android version 4.4.4 KitKat with HTC Sense 6.0 UI on top. There’s every chance that this phone could receive Android Lollipop update as its chip-set is capable enough. HTC Sense 6.0 UI is pretty sleek. It also comes with HTC exclusive apps like ‘HTC Zoe’ which could turn your static photos in-to a colourful video/slideshow with music automatically. I haven’t experienced any lags or slow downs or frozen screens when i was using it so that’s pretty good on the OS side.

It comes with 16GB internal memory, out of which you’ll get around 9GB free to use and you can expand it further with a micro SD card. It takes up-to 128GB. It has 2GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 1.2GB free. It does support move to SD but it won’t move the actual data to the external micro SD card so i think there’s no point of it. You can not install apps/games directly on the micro SD card there’s no option of preferred install location. It does support

Multimedia

HTC’s BoomSound speakers are the best that i have heard/seen on a smartphone. And this is the first time i was hearing them so i was kind of surprised by the quality. As i am only used to listening to cheap crappy ordinary smartphones speakers. Which usually comes in affordable(translation : budget) smartphones. They are not the loudest i have heard. The loudest speakers i have ever heard in a mobile phone without any sound distortion was in Nokia 6233. That phone was like ultra portable boom-box.

Anyway coming back to the point BoomSound speakers aren’t the loudest but they are the only smartphone speakers, i have heard to that gives that depth to the music, they actually do have some bass. unlike the shallow sound that comes out of most of the smartphone’s speakers. Oh and did i tell you it has built in amplifier?

I got in-ear earphones inside the box but they are not that good in quality. They have almost no bass and they distort a lot. Only use them if you don’t have a decent pair of earphones lying around otherwise you won’t do justice with Desire 820’s music quality. It is pretty good in general but its music quality changes a lot depending on the earphones you are using. The better the earphones/headphones the better the sound. Oh and it doesn’t have an equalizer. This phone does have FM Radio.

Now, coming on the video side. It can play videos up-to 1080p resolution in its default video player without any problems. Unfortunately that’s the limit of Snapdragon 615 it can not play 4K or 2K resolution video in its default video player but in MX player it can play 2K video without much problem but 4K video is still a no go.

Performance to price ratio

HTC Desire 820 comes with Snapdragon 615 chip-set which contains four Cortex A53 processors clocked at 1.5GHz nd 4 Cortex A53 processors clocked at 1.0GHz. Adreno 405 GPU. It is a 64 bit octa-core chip-set. Now you must be thinking why am i not mentioning 64-bit a lot as it should be a big deal. Well as a matter of fact it is not. At least not right now. It is nothing but a marketing gimmick. Although in long term it might become meaningful as the developers start to develop for 64-bit specifically. Like in windows A 64-bit computer can run 32-bit software/applications but a 32-bit computer can not run 64-bit application. Same applies to the Android right now. So my advice would be don’t read too much in-to this ’64-bit’ hoopla right now. Just be happy that your device is kind of ‘future proof’.

Now, price to performance ratio. Well for 25,000 Rupees or $400 you are getting pretty decent performance i must say. As the phone itself hardly ever stutters. Apps don’t slow down. Phone functions remains instant most of the time. It can play almost all of the games available in the Google Play Store at least in low to medium settings if not at maximum settings. So i would say price to performance ratio of HTC Desire 820 is pretty good. Comparing it to phones around same price range like Desire 816, Xperia T3, C3 and many more It is miles better. Although i would still say the price is a bit on high side.

Communication

It is a dual SIM device it takes two nano SIMs. The quality of both ear piece and mic is very good. It has dual-band WiFi, DLNA and WiFi direct. Oh and LTE/4G too. The WiFi is pretty fast as expected from a dual-band WiFi. It also has Bluetooth 4.0 like they would forget that.

Battery Life

Battery life of HTC Desire 820 just like every other phone in the world depends on the way you use it. For example, if you use it for gaming only, you’ll lose battery very fast. For instance, i kept playing/emulating Tekken 3 on it when the battery was close to 40% and not even after one hour it was in the red area. It came down to 9% and started asking me to connect a charger, even activated power saving mode itself. It definitely won’t last you a day like that. But if you use it normally like a little this and little that then its battery have enough juice that it will hold up to one day. Its battery is of 2600 mAh.

Verdict/Choice

HTC Desire 820 is an over all pretty decent phone with decent performance. And it is a great buy right now. But still my advice would be to wait a little don’t buy it for Rupees 25,000 which is its MRP let the price come down to 20,000 – 23,000 Rupees then it will become an even better buy. And don’t even look at the competition like Xperia T3, C3, T2 Ultra, HTC Desire 816 as they all have that cringe worthy Snapdragon 400 chip-set. You can buy C3 for front camera with LED flash, but if you want performance too then HTC Desire 820 is your best choice. And finally, the choice will always be yours. Can’t call a review of mine complete without that golden line. Anyway, If you have any queries regarding this phone you can ask me in the comments section below.