HTC Desire 816 review By Slashdot

Hey guys come here from phone dog, calm and I have an HTC Desire, eight one six now this was launched in February at MWC in Barcelona, and it was released to be one of those phones. That was there for people who didn't want to spend a lot of money, but still wanted a good big phone, and so that's what this is, but before I get into the review. Let's thank our friends at Best Buy Mobile for often giving us phones to give away to you guys in our one pod, bandit spin2win, giveaway game over at phone dog, calm, I'll, leave a link and all sorts of other links in the description below. But let's get to the review now, we'll start off with the design, there's no escaping that. This phone is made from plastic, but it's made from two parts or two different materials on the back. You have this shiny glossy panel, whereas around the sides and forming the main body of the phone is a harder, more solid, matte finished polycarbonate.

It's got curved edges around the top bottom and both sides, and that helps give it a more comfortable in hand. Feel now there is a seam where you see the two materials join all the way around the edges, and that looks like it should give you a less than premium feel, or at least a poor quality feel, but it doesn't actually feel surprisingly solid in hand granted it's not as solid as what you might get from an unibody phone, but it still feels more solid than a lot of other plastic phones, and it certainly does not feel flimsy now right on the top right-hand edge. What you'll find is an elongated flap underneath here is where you'll find your micro SIM and NATO SIM ports on the other side, you have your power and lock key, as well as your volume rocker. Both are easy to get to both easy to click and both do what they should do. The front of the phone is dominated mostly by a large glass panel.

Now this covers your five and a half inch 720p display, as well as the usual thick black bezels, that you normally used to seeing on an HTC device these days on the top and the bottom of the display. Is your stereo speakers all-in-all? It feels solid, feels comfortable, feels well-made, and actually it's very easy to get your hand around at least my hand around granted. If you've got smaller hands, you might struggle because it is bordering on the large size, but HTC has done the best to make the best of that by making it curved and making it quite thin onto the display. It's not Full HD, but it is 720p resolution, which means you do get a pixel density of just under two hundred and seventy pixels per inch, not quite at your 300 pixels per inch magic number, but still it's not fuzzy. It's not lacking in detail, and actually I was generally very surprised by the overall quality of the display.

Viewing angles are very good: there's no noticeable discoloration when you turn it on you're. Looking at a white screen, colors are really, really nice and natural. The only thing that you might notice is text isn't as sharp as what you might expect from a full HD screen, but it's not that noticeable that you have a poor experience using the phone. I didn't have any problems. Whether I was playing games or watching videos, it felt like a fantastic overall experience from the display.

Now, surely, with all these good things about a mid-range phone you're expecting that there'll be a compromise and normally that's with the camera in this case, not so much the camera on the back is a 13 megapixel shooter. It takes great photos in daylight, it's easy and quick to focus. It creates good depth of field, and it has a good range when you, when it comes to auto exposure. What you will find is that sometimes, when you have scenes where there's bright and dark and there's quite a high contrast between those, then it does struggle to even them out. There's no naturally built in HDR.

But there are some really nice manual controls in there to help you make the best of the situation. Otherwise, when you come to shooting automatically and just pointing and shooting you can get some perfect results, it probably doesn't quite compare to the likes of the iPhone 5s or the Samsung Galaxy s5, but still it's much better than what you'd expect from a mid-range phone, and it also shoots in full HD and the front camera is a 5 megapixel camera as well. So you get good quality. Selfies low-light performance is a little meh. It doesn't produce amazing shots, but at the same time, they're not the worst that I've ever seen now on to the sound- and this is something that's become a bit of a trademark for HTC.

It does have the stereo speak on the top in the bottom of the display, and they produce fantastic, loud sound. Furthermore, it's got a good balance when you compare it to other phones that only have single speakers. Furthermore, it is a perfect experience, especially when you're playing games or watching movies. Furthermore, it helps you to feel a lot more immersed in what you're, watching or playing there's really very little to complain about here. What I will say on the sound front is that it doesn't have very good headphones in the packaging.

So if you do like to listen to music using Spotify in your own, headphones you're, better off just using whatever headphones, you already have, because the ones in the box are really quite terrible now on to performance and battery life and will mention performance. First, it's equipped with one of the new Snapdragon 400 series, cortex a7 processors, it's a 1.6, gigahertz quad-core processor, and it makes light use of almost anything that you throw at it now. Sometimes there was a little of lag here in there when switching between apps or launching apps, but it's nothing that I haven't experienced on a higher-end phone. It's a 2600 William hour battery and that may not seem like if it's enough to fit in a phone this size. But when you consider that the screen resolution is lower than most flagship phones, and you consider that the processor is less powerful than the other flagship phones, there's less for the battery to do and actually in most cases, I got the charge the full charge.

To last me, a full two days: I was quite frankly blown away, it's fantastic. So all in all considering it's a mid-range phone, there are very few compromises with the desire. Eight one, six after item boxed it last week, I actually found myself using it as my daily driver for about three or four days it wasn't on purpose, but because I liked it so much I liked the way it felt I liked what I could do with it. I liked the experience that I got. Overall, it's actually become one of my own personal favorite phones of this year.

It's regardless of price. It generally is a very good phone, and that really surprised me see this is my surprised, face this phone surprised me a lot and in a good way. Just so. You get an idea of the price as well. This retails at about 290 pounds brand-new in the UK for comparison, the Galaxy, Note 3 lives, the Xperia z2 and the HTC One m8 are all around the 500-pound mark.

It's not available in the states just yet, but there have been rumors that there is a model coming to Sprint, and they have spotted Sprint compatible versions going through FCC filings. So let's hope that it does eventually land on US soil, because really this is one of the best mid-range phones, I have ever seen or used, and I don't say that lightly. It really is genuinely amazing. I've been cam I'm at phone dog, underscore cam on Twitter. Don't ask me any questions or tell me I'm an idiot for liking this phone.

So much, please feel free, shout at me on there or use the comments and of course, if you like this, if you like what we do like our videos, pick thumbs up and subscribe and stay tuned for more quality content from phone ROG comm I will see you again soon. So I'm about to start filming. My review of this, the sony, HTC Desire, eight one, six, one of the best phones, I've used this year. Oddly enough, all good, let's go.

Source : Slashdot