HTC Desire 820s Review – Feel The Power Of Midrange

Yeah! Feel it! Whom need a high end phone when you can get this kind of performance at less than half the price of a flagship phone. The price which is only going to come down further. HTC Desire 820s is both a very big upgrade in terms of performance and downgrade in terms of software when compared to the original 820 though. If you don’t know what i am talking about, read on.

Hardware

Looks like a big white piece of glossy plastic from a far. But when you pick it up, you can feel its solid build quality. And despite of all that power underneath. It’s still very light-weight. It weighs only 155 grams and is 7.74 mm thick. Basically if you have ever hold a Desire 820 or 820q in hands, it is exactly like that. And it does have a notification LED.

Display

HTC Desire 820s comes with 5.5 inch LCD display of HD resolution. With very good viewing angles. Although it’s neither mentioned on the box nor on the website but i am guessing it is an IPS display. And just like that is not mentioned anywhere, it is also not mentioned anywhere that this phone has Gorilla Glass 3. But since it is the same exact body as Desire 820 which does have Gorilla Glass. I guess it’s safe to assume that this phone does too. It also have decent overall brightness and colour reproduction.

Camera

This phone doesn’t come with HTC Sense so as a side effect of that it also doesn’t come with its camera app. And if you think there is no difference believe me there is. The original HTC Desire 820 on the other hand does have all the Sense camera features, which gives it a slight edge over this 820s.

HTC Desire 820s has the default Android camera UI and features. On the name of selfie features all it has is that default “face beauty mode”. While 820 have a lot of dedicated editing features built in. So it’s kind of a bad thing for ‘selfie’ lovers or people that like to ‘edit’ or ‘touch up’ their photos a lot.

That doesn’t make its camera quality bad though. Since it has the same 13MP camera with BSI sensor and 8MP front camera. So, the hardware is still there. Image quality is very good in almost all lighting conditions, thanks to its BSI sensor. It picks up fairly natural colours and details and doesn’t overdo things in post processing. End photo looks pretty real life like.

But due to lack of all the front camera features, you might not like to look at your own face if it’s captured by the front camera of this phone. The quality is not bad, the problem is it is too real and too true. Which is actually what people don’t want in a selfie or in life. Quite ironic. And on top of everything front camera is not that bright by default as it doesn’t have BSI sensor there. Rest of the camera features includes 1080p video recording from both cameras, quality is not that good though since it only shoots in 3GP format. Touch to focus, auto focus. Simultaneous video and photo capture is there too.

Multimedia

All that power and it still can’t play a 4K video at full speed. But then again, companies gotta left something for the real high end chipsets don’t they. Anyway apart from that this phone is multimedia powerhouse. Powerhouse because it can play almost any format that you can put on it since it is Android and also because of quality. Music quality through both, its two external speakers and in ear earphones/headphones is very good. And HTC is not officially calling the two speakers in front of this phone boom sound speakers. But they are. It doesn’t matter what they call them or don’t call them, nothing could change the fact that they are very good external speakers.

OS/RAM/Storage

Now this is ‘downgrade’ that i was talking about. This phone even though available at around the same price as original 820 still doesn’t come with full HTC Sense UI. It instead comes with somewhat default Android skin similar to what you see in most budget Android phones. So, that’s something you might not like. I didn’t, but all the raw power that this phone has made it up for me. If you look beyond the cosmetic changes though, you’ll see that OS is completely lag free and buttery smooth all thanks to its new and very powerful chipset.

It comes with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory out of which, you’ll get around 12GB free. It is expandable via micro SD card. And here’s the best part about its memory, since it comes with Android 4.4.4 KitKat it has a little different memory management than 4.4.2 you can actually put/install games on memory card on this phone and it also has move to sd feature.

Performance

The price to performance ratio of this phone is kind of hard to gauge. Since its price varies a lot. But the most common price i found it selling was around 23,000 Rupees or approx $370. Now, that we have settled on the price, lets talk about performance. This phone is one of the fastest if not the fastest phone available around this price range. It was only beaten by One Plus One in only Antutu. But then in Vellamo it beat One Plus One with a healthy margin. So i guess it’s a tie. One Plus One runs on a high end Snapdragon chipset though. While this 820s runs on a new Mediatek chipset named as MT6752. Which is not a high-end chipset but still gives high-end performance. Another thing, try to find One Plus One in a store near you… You can’t. While this phone about as powerful or even more in some cases is available easily in local stores or online.

Mediatek 6752 has octa core Cortex A53 processors clocked at 1.7GHz and Mali T760 GPU. A combination that helped it beat some of the high end devices in benchmarks. Its performs not only in just benchmarks. Its performance is very much visible in gaming. It is made for gaming. Enough said. It could run almost all the games available in play store right now, at highest possible settings. At full speed, without any lagging or stuttering. You can see that in my gaming video. The phones gets a little warm/hot around its chipset area if there’s a lot of stress on GPU.

Here’s my verdict on its price to performance ratio ‘more power/performance than you would ever need available at very affordable price’.

Communication

Just like old 820 this 820s is also 4G capable, not that it matters since it is not even widely available in India yet. But if you live in a country where it is, i guess it’s a good thing for you. The top ear piece of this phone is also one of its loud speakers so as a reward of that the call quality is loud, crisp and clear. WiFi is very fast and range is good too. It also has Bluetooth 4.0 oh and it is a dual sim(Nana sim) phone by the way. It also has cast screen.

Battery

The battery capacity of this phone is 2600 mAh and HTC is suggesting around 12.1 hours of talk-time on 3G on this phone on a single charge. Which is possible. Only in terms of talk-time though. Its powerful chipset doesn’t help much in terms of battery life. It helps in gaming but then again gaming is also a no no if you want to save your battery life. Realistically you are looking around 7-8 hours or a day of battery life on moderate to minimal use. It does have a power saving mode which could help preserve the battery further.

Verdict

Buy it. Simple as that.