HTC Desire C review

The five megapixel camera isn’t too shabby, but it doesn’t live up to the best examples even at this level of detail. Our test shots had natural colours and well-judged exposures, but zoom in and aggressive noise reduction left everything looking like an abstract painting. As mentioned before, there’s no LED flash, so snapping your mates at a party will be a tough ask. Unlike the cameras on the One series phones, there’s no high-speed bust mode here.

Once resized for use on the internet, images from the camera look pretty good – click to enlarge

But this pixel-to-pixel crop of the original shows the lack of detail – click to enlarge

As per usual, HTC has included its Beats music technology here. We’ve been over this numerous times, and are convinced this amounts to little more than a graphic equalizer setting with the emphasis on artificially increasing dynamic range to make music sound ‘bigger’. Whether you like this is entirely down to personal taste, but we’re not convinced.

Same interface, but the camera lacks the burst mode found on more expensive HTC models

One positive side of the relatively small display and slow processor is the battery life. In our continuous playback video test, the HTC Desire C lasted for ten hours and seven minutes. This is a fantastic score, especially considering its relatively small 1,230mAh battery. It just goes to show how much battery life has improved under Android 4, though this is often counteracted by powerful dual-core processors.

CONCLUSION

The HTC Desire C is now two years old, but it’s still amazing how far budget Android handsets have come in that time. At the time the HTC Desire C was nothing very special admittedly, with its sluggish single-core processor, 512MB of RAM and a terrible 480×320 screen resolution.

Even with Android 4.0 it seems pretty much unusable by modern standards, in the old version of the SunSpider benchmark it scored a risible 6,778ms, that’s around five times slower than typical budget handsets today and around 10x slower than the top-end flagship phones. It can’t run modern 3D games smoothly, or even at all.

The camera had no flash and there’s only 4GB of storage available. At least the small 3.5in screen means that the battery lasted a respectable ten hours, about the only place where it does live up to the standards of modern handsets.

If you’ve come to this review thinking of picking up a HTC Desire C for cheap, or second-hand, our advice would be don’t do it. It’s not up to running today’s versions of apps like Google Maps, where it slows to a crawl. Things have come on so far, so quickly, so find the extra money and get a Motorola Moto G, which is far, far better in every respect.