HTC DESIRE 816
Positioned as a “flagship midrange” device, the Desire 816 does have the looks of one; its design language is inspired from the One series with a unibody chassis. However, it is encased in a polycarbonate body. Nonetheless, HTC did a pretty good job with the build quality. It feels very solid and more importantly, does not look cheap as plastic phones normally do. The sides have a matte texture that aids in handling a phone of its size, but the glossy texture of its rear will pose a nightmare for anyone who can’t tolerate fingerprints and smudges.
The Desire 816 sports a 5.5-inch 720p Super LCD 2 display. Even though it isn’t full HD, it is still pleasing to look at. Pixelation is hardly visible and color reproduction is accurate with wide viewing angles.
The Desire 816 supports LTE CAT 4 speeds of up to 150Mbps, a feature that could be a deciding buying factor for consumers who need a faster 4G cellular data connection; not all phones in our list support LTE CAT 4.
The Desire 816 runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat with the latest Sense 6 overlay. Due to hardware limitations, it does not have the full feature set as its One (M8) flagship phone such as Motion Launch Gestures, but you still get key features such as BlinkFeed and Extreme Power Savings Mode. Housed at the rear of the device is a 13-megapixel camera with an aperture of f/2.2 and a backside illuminated (BSI) sensor. Consumers who love taking selfies will appreciate the front-facing 5-megapixel camera with wide angle lens. Fortunately, the image quality is as good as it seems on paper and a standout feature among all the phones if photos are your priority.
The Desire 816 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core 1.6GHz processor and 1.5GB RAM. During day-to-day usage, the user experience felt snappy with fast screen transitions. Its 8GB internal storage should suffice for mainstream consumers, but if you need additional storage space, the Desire 816 is one of the only two phones in this shootout to have microSD support for memory cards up to 128GB.