I recently bought an htc desire 816 and after using it for a couple of months, here is a short review of how I found this phone, both in terms of performance and design.
Build and Design: The build quality is pretty good with a glossy finish giving it a premium feel. It doesn’t have any physical keys at the front and uses on-screen keys for navigation. Even though some people say that it is a bid too large, I do not really agree with it. Almost every other phone in the market comes of the same size these days. Even iphone 6 is larger than this phone. Despite the large size, even people with small fingers will find it easily manageable.
Sound: I was a bit disappointed with the phone in this aspect. It has dual stereo BoomSound speakers on both sides at the front however it still doesn’t feel that loud. Even while listening to music, the sound quality was not that great. Base was completely missing and it felt like I was listening to songs on a cheap mp3 player.
Earphones: Surprisingly it comes with the old style earphones and not plugphones (the ones that fit inside your ears). The earphones were a completely tragedy. My ears started to hurt after putting those on for a while and music was just awful. I had to trash the earphones after a couple of days and had to use my Sony ones with it.
Cameras: It has a 13 MP camera and a 5 MP selfie camera at the front. I do not really use the camera much because I anyways have a DSLR but I did click a few shots to test how the camera was and it turned out to be OK. What bothered me was that it takes a while to focus and even the slightest shake of your hand would ruin the picture. You got to have very steady hands to get good pictures with this phone. Low light photos looked noisy and lacked detail.
Display: It sports a 5.5 inch super LCD2 display with a resolution of 720×1280 pixels in a unibody form factor with rounded corners. Although the number of pixels packed is a bit less due to the large size of the display, Images and text appears sharp and you will not notice any pixilation. Colors appear vivid while watching video and viewing angles were also good. Under-sun legibility too was good. The screen has a near-180-degree viewing angle, gets bright enough for outdoor use, and reproduces natural-looking colors. It however doesn’t come with a Gorilla glass protection so you will have to buy a scratch guard.
Performance: It has a 1.6GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor and 1.5GB RAM and this is where it gives value of the money. There will not be any lag while launching and switching between apps or doing any other task on the phone. It is of course a mid-range device but you will not feel it underpowered and the hardware is definitely capable of supporting multitasking and gaming without any problems. The performance overall is smooth.
Battery Backup: This is another plus point with this phone. It has a great battery backup. It comes with a 2600mAh battery that will last more than a day with moderate usage, including a couple of hours of taking calls. It also has an extreme power saving mode if you ever started to run out of the battery. I tried activating the extreme power saving mode after charging the battery in full, just to test, and my phone didn’t run out of juice for three days.
Gaming: I have played several games on this phone without any problem at all. It doesn’t hang and there were no frame drops or freezes however it does get a little warm after playing a game for a while.
Final Verdict: Final word is that it is a decent enough phone that will not disappoint you except for the sound and camera aspect.
