Hands on: HTC Desire 620 review

HTC's Desire range has been aiming to please the mid range end of the market for a number of years now but so far it hasn't been able to meet the grade.

Following on from the all-round mediocre HTC Desire 610, the Desire 620 comes up with exactly what that phone wanted to achieve.

You can pick up a Desire 620 for around £169.99 (about $260, AU$330) at the moment, making it a more expensive choice in this market.

Design

The HTC Desire 620 fits well in the hand with the 5-inch 720p display easy to reach on all sides. The screen is on the small side considering the size of the phone as there are some pretty hefty bezels here, especially on the top and bottom of the 620.

The back panel of the phone is removable and it offers a decent level of grip. Don't expect a premium feel here though, it's cheap and plasticy feeling and a little too rubbery for my liking as it picks up the slightest greasy marks in a matter of seconds.

On the right hand side sits the power button right where your thumb will be and the volume rocker is just above.

The top edge of the handset houses the 3.5mm headphone jack whilst the microUSB slot is on the bottom right hand corner.

The bezels along the top and bottom of the handset are widely oversized but this is mostly to give room for the universally loved BoomSound speakers.

Those continue to blow me away whenever testing out HTC handsets and that's no exception here.

The Desire 620's 5-inch display is not going to blow anyone away, offering a similar quality to its mid-range competition. The brightness is impressive and images look good with a pixel density of 294ppi, but viewing angles could be a bit of an issue in bright environments.

Performance

In the little time I had playing around with the handset I found performance from the 1.2GHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM to be good, but not anything to write home about.

After setting a few apps to run at a time there was a noticeable slowdown in performance, but not anything you wouldn't expect from a mid-range handset.

I also played a little of the graphically intensive Real Racing 3 on the Desire 620 to put it through it paces and it performed quite well.

There was a little bit of jolting at the start when the game loaded up and textures took a little longer to pop in than on some other phones, but overall it was still an enjoyable experience.

Battery

The battery on the Desire 620 has had a small boost up to 2,100mAh compared to the 2,040mAh cell on the Desire 610.

When put through the TechRadar video battery test the Desire 610 came out with 74% battery remaining, an average level for handsets of this type. Expect a more thorough look at the Desire 620 battery in our full review, but for now there isn't anything jumping out to suggest it'll be any less than last time.

The essentials

The HTC Desire 620 doesn't come with many particularly unique features. The phone is a dual-SIM meaning you've got two slots allowing you to run the one phone on two different numbers.

Apart from that and the BoomSound speakers mentioned earlier, nothing much jumps out at you.

The handset is running Android 4.4.4 KitKat with Sense 6.0 UI over the top. The experience is much the same as you'll find with all HTC phones but there's no word on an update to Android 5.0 Lollipop just yet.

Camera

After a little playing around with the camera I got to test the shooter in reasonably poor lighting conditions, with acceptable results. The Desire 620 has an 8MP sensor with autofocus and LED flash as standard, and while it won't challenge the best smartphone snappers, it'll suffice for many.

Features include the basics like touch focus, face detection and panoramic shots as well as 1080p video recording. The front selfie camera is strong again with a 5MP sensor and 1080p video recording.

Verdict

The HTC Desire 620 has built on the work of its predecessor and become exactly what the Desire 610 wanted to be - and probably should have been.

HTC has created a substantial mid-ranger with some good specs and power behind it but the competition in his market is looking tougher and tougher each iteration.

Take the Moto G 2014 for instance, you'll be paying £30 less for a similar spec. That said the HTC Desire 620 still stands up on its own with a good looking 720p display and a functional design many will love.