HTC Desire 816: Review

                                                        HTC Desire 816: Review
                                               Is it good enough as an old phablet?




Phablets have been domianted by one smartphone lately and that's the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. But while it's easily the best large-screen phone you can buy today, it's also one of the most expensive, with SIM-free prices currently sitting around £600. That's a lot of money to pay if all you want is a big screen, but luckily that's where the HTC Desire 816 comes in. Its 5.5in display may not be as large as the Note 4's, but at £275 SIM-free, the Desire 816 is considerably cheaper, making it a great budget option if you want a phone with an oversized screen.

The bezels round the screen are chunky, particularly at the top and bottom of the phone where you'll find the Desire 816's dual BoomSound speakers, but its smooth, glossy chassis and rounded corners make it very easy to hold. The Desire 816 is admittedly a little slippery compared to phones with matt backs, but it never actually slid out of hands.

The Desire 816's quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor may not sound particularly apt for a phone of this size and price (the cheaper Motorola Moto G also uses this processor, for example), but HTC has increased the processor's clock speed to 1.6GHz rather than the typical 1.2GHz, giving the phone a boost in raw performance speed.

Paired with 1.5GB of memory, the processor’s extra speed certainly helped in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, as the Desire 816 completed the test in 1,060ms using its default browser. This is roughly 100ms faster than HTC's more expensive One Mini 2, which uses a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor, and it's also marginally quicker than the Galaxy Mega.

All this power doesn't come at the expense of battery life either, as the Desire 816's huge 2,600mAh battery lasted an impressive 13 hours and 47 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This is actually twenty minutes longer than the One (m8) and three hours more than the Galaxy Mega, putting the Desire 816 firmly ahead of its main competitor. The Desire 816 also has two dedicated power saving modes to help it last even longer, so you should definitely be able to use the phone all day without having to worry about returning it to the mains mid-afternoon.