HTC Desire 620 Review

HTC Desire 620 Review Scoring Summary

Style & Handling
User Friendliness
Feature Set
Performance
Battery Power
Overall Score

Pros	Cons
+ Large screen	- Not much storage
+ Stylish screen	- Mediocre screen
+ Decent camera	- Only 720p display resolution
Verdict: The HTC Desire 620 is a lot of phone for not a lot of money, but some of the specs are slightly disappointing.

HTC Desire 620 Review and Specification

The HTC Desire 620 is immediately striking, with its two-tone design and large screen. It certainly looks impressive, especially for a £200 handset, but with an average processor and a 720p resolution it runs the risk of just having skin deep appeal.

So does it have the magic to make it a must-have or is the Desire 620 destined to join the faceless ranks of average mid-rangers? Read on to find out.

Screen

The HTC Desire 620 has a 5.0-inch 720 x 1280 Super LCD display, with a pixel density of 294 pixels per inch.

It’s fairly large, especially for a mid-range phone, coming in at just about the perfect balance of being small enough to use one-handed and fit in a pocket, while being big enough to easily web browse and enjoy media on.

But it’s not a complete win, as a 720p resolution isn’t special, especially on a screen of that size. Its 294ppi pixel density means that it’s reasonably crisp but far from pin sharp. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect any more from a £200 phone, but we can’t help but feel that a 720p resolution on a slightly smaller screen would have been a better compromise.

Design

The Desire 620 is made of plastic, so it doesn’t come close to the premium appeal of the HTC One (M8), but it still looks good, with a two-tone design, where the back, side and speaker grills are one colour, while the rim, camera and logo are another.

It’s a good, distinctive look and the Desire 620 feels well-built too. It’s not slim at 9.6mm thick, but it fits nicely in the hand.

The front of the handset is home to dual front-facing BoomSound speakers for superior sound quality, which is a nice addition and other than the lack of metal and the fact that it’s neither dust nor waterproof there’s little to complain about when it comes to the design of the 620.

Power

With a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor and 1GB of RAM the HTC Desire 620 provides reasonable performance, but it’s a little less powerful than we’d have hoped, as you can get phones for far less with the same innards. Even HTC’s own Desire 510 is £75 cheaper and just as powerful.

Still, you won’t really notice the lack of power most of the time as HTC’s Sense interface is smooth and zippy. The HTC Desire 620 also has 4G support, so it’s a fast performer when it comes to downloading, uploading and streaming using mobile data.

Camera

The HTC Desire 620 has an 8 megapixel rear camera with an LED flash. It can shoot 1080p video at 30fps and there’s a 5 megapixel camera on the front, which can also shoot video in 1080p.

That’s not bad at all for an affordable handset and while it won’t rival a flagship in camera performance it’s more than capable of taking some impressive, detailed shots, whether using the front or rear camera.

The camera software also includes all the core features you’d expect like a panorama mode and face detection and you can always download apps from Google Play to fill in any gaps.

Features

Perhaps the biggest problem with the HTC Desire 620 is its lack of features. It has all the basics that a phone needs- a screen, a battery, a processor etc, done with varying degrees of accomplishment. But it doesn’t really have much extra and with the possible exception of the 5.0-inch size point it doesn’t really excel with any of its specs either. That’s a problem, because it can make it hard to stand out. Still, it’s not totally devoid of features worth mentioning. The BoomSound speakers pump out decent quality sound and its Sense interface is slick and attractive, as well as including BlinkFeed, which is a convenient and stylish way to get all your news and updates form a single screen.

Battery life, memory and connectivity

There’s a 2100 mAh battery in the HTC Desire 620, which should last a day without worry, but you’ll likely have to charge it overnight or by half way through the following day unless you use the phone very sparingly.

There’s just 8GB of built in storage but the phone also has a microSD card slot with support for cards of up to 128GB, so there’s plenty of room for expansion if you invest in a big card.

Connectivity options include 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, but there’s no NFC, which means, among other things, no contactless payment support.

Verdict

The HTC Desire 620 is a good all-rounder for the money, with a stylish design, a big screen, a decent camera and reasonable battery life. It could do with a touch more power and a bit more storage and there are lots of little niggles like the 720p resolution, but it’s not massively lacking in any area.

It also doesn’t really stand out in any area, which makes it hard to enthusiastically recommend it. But for the £200 that it costs it’s a safe option which won’t let you down on any front