Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has its back to the wall. With flagging profit and revenue, the company is a prime example of how one bad year can be very difficult to recover from, despite having some of the best products in the market. The company has always been known for its premium smartphones and Desire 600 is placed between its high-end and mid-range phones, with the price at R26,990.
HTC phones have always been very well-designed and the Desire 600 is another good example. In fact, this year?s HTC phones have been great in terms of design and build quality. The HTC 8X had a great curved touchscreen, the Butterfly was sleek, light and nice to hold, and the One?s metal body won accolades worldwide.
Desire 600 is not as good as any of those phones, but the black variant has a slightly rough finish at the back, which adds to its premium feel. Note that other colours may have a glossy finish, which doesn?t feel as premium. The phone is incredibly light at just 130 grams.
That apart, the Desire 600 is well-built and fairly scratch resistant. When used for over a week, it retained no scratches in spite of being dropped a few times. The 4.5-inch screen may not be the best in the price range, but the display is good enough. Reading books and magazines on the device was a good experience, but a screen with higher resolution than its 244 ppi would have been appreciated. The touchscreen is very responsive and is one of the best in the market.
HTC?s custom skin (Sense 5) that is a layer on top of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) works well. It adds BlinkFeed to the Desire 600, which puts all your social network feeds and news in one place and displays them in tiles. This feature is great but most users would be better off not using it as the default home screen. However, this phone does not have HTC Zoe, the feature that let users click many pictures and select the best frames.
Sense 5 will irk some power users as common options are not easy to access. Let?s say you are lying on a sofa, reading a long article on Google Chrome. As you shift position, Chrome keeps switching from horizontal to vertical mode and back, which gets in the way of your reading experience. Stock Android lets users lock auto-rotation from the notifications menu, but Sense 5 buries that option.
But those who have used HTC One will notice minor lags while using this phone. If you tap on a tweet or Facebook post on BlinkFeed, there is a slight lag before the respective app opens up. Although the phone did not freeze or lag when running apps, games took longer than usual to open. The camera is pretty good in bright light and low light. However, 8 GB internal memory is too low, so users will have to keep clearing memory after a point, or resort to storing data in the microSD card. Even then, the number of apps you can install will hit the ceiling pretty quickly.
Overall, this would have been a great phone if not for one major issue?battery life. Under moderate use without games, the phone ran out of charge in eight to 12 hours. The maximum it lasted was 15 hours, but that was because it was in standby for around seven hours when the reviewer was asleep. If users are always around a plug point, this is a great phone to own. Else, they will spend a lot of time worrying about when and where to charge the phone.
