HTC has been almost carpet bombing the Indian smartphone market with phones across price points over the past year or so. It has given the Taiwanese company some hits and a few misses. However, the company seems to be pushing more updates of its popular models for 2015.
The HTC Desire 820 was one of the most successful models from the company last year. This year, the phone has been upgraded into a dual SIM model with some software tweaks too. The phone looks unmistakably like something from the HTC Desire family.
The HTC Desire 820s offers a really good crisp HD display that has good viewing angles. It has a large screen of 5.5-inches. The camera combo is still among the best in the mid-range. Not many other phones can offer a 13 MP rear camera with a 8 MP front clicker. The phone will find favour with selfie addicts as they will get more pixels to record those duck faces.
The big change in the phone is under the hood, as the 820s uses a MediaTek processor unlike its predecessor which had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615. Like with other new MediaTek powered phones, this one too packs a punch when it comes to processing power. It also shows in the benchmark scores which are now closer to flagship phones. In fact, the Antutu score was better than the HTC One M8 and just under the One Plus One. And despite all this, the phone does not heat up unnecessarily.
The phone has the best camera configuration in the price band, as I said. But the camera is not upto the quality that we have come to expect from HTC. Of course, it is better than what you might get at this price, but the pictures appeared a bit too sharp for my liking.
The glossy back cover could be a problem for some users and use cases. I would prefer matte finish to this cover, which could also pick up scratches over time. The phone should get the HTC Sense 7.0 version soon, however till then it is stuck with an Android KitKat-based user interface. Not a great thing to put on your spec sheet in March 2015.
Should you buy it? Yes, if you are looking for a very powerful phone for around R25,000. However, if you can compromise a bit and don’t really need dual SIM, the older version HTC Desire 820 is available for about R3,000 less.
SPECIFICATIONS
Display: 5.5-inch (720 x 1280p, ~267 ppi) display
Processor: Octa-core 1.7 GHz Mediatek MT6752 processor
Operating system: Android Kitkat with HTC Sense 6.0 UI
RAM: 2 GB RAM
Memory: 16 GB internal memory, upgradeable upto 32GB
Camera: 3 MP (rear); 8 MP front camera
SIM type: 4G LTE dual nano SIM
Estimated street price: R24,890
