Can you imagine using a phone running
KitKat in 2016? We certainly can’t, but it’s
apparently not that hard for HTC. The
Desire 626 Dual Sim would have been a
very decent phone a couple of years ago,
but with Android 4.4 as an OS at launch,
it was out of date before it even hit the
market.
Keeping that in mind, we’ll try to keep this
review as short and simple( definitely not
sweet) as possible.
Build
Quality:
6/10
The phone is made almost entirely of
plastic and doesn’t feels cheap. Of
particular note is the power button, which,
while well placed, is the most mushy
power button I’ve ever had to use. It’s as
if the button is soaked in molasses; it
takes its own sweet time getting back up.
Granted, this might be an issue with this
particular review sample, but it’s not like
the volume buttons were any better
either.
In terms of design, the volume and power
buttons fall on the right of the device and
the SIM card dual-SIM tray on the right.
At the bottom you find a single micro-USB
slot for charging and the 3.5mm
headphone jack resides at the top. Very
standard as far as HTC is concerned.
What’s not standard are the dual-front
firing speakers which grace the front of
the device. Thankfully, the rear camera
also doesn’t protrude. Given the size of
the device, it sports a 5-inch screen, it fit
very nicely in the hand. It’s just too bad
that the device felt so cheap.
Features: 7/10
The device features a 5-inch, 720p
screen, 4G support, 16GB internal memory
and 2GB of RAM. The processor is a
MediaTek MT6752 and you get a 13MP
rear camera and 5MP front camera, both
of which can record video at 1080p. The
device also supports microSD cards up to
32GB in capacity.
The battery is a measly 2000mAh one and
isn’t removable. The device supports Wi-fi
802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP
and GPS. A pretty bland feature-set,
particularly with regards to the screen.
That said, a 720p resolution on a 5-inch
screen isn’t bad and it’s not like you can
see the pixels anyway.
Display: 6.5/10
The display is a bog-standard 5-inch, 720p
display. Nothing outrageous here. Colour
rendition was good. The brightness was
good enough for use in direct sunlight and
the viewing angles were okay.
Software: 5/10
The first nail in the 626’s coffin is the OS.
Android 4.4.4 on a device in 2016 is just
not acceptable and we can’t think of any
earthly reason as to why it has to be so
restricted or why HTC didn’t update it
after launch. It was immensely frustrating
using 4.4.4, especially after getting used
to 5.0. Sense is anyway a skin on top of
Android, but it’s a very mild skin that
doesn’t affect too much of stock
Android’s functionality.
Performance: 7/10
The device performance isn’t bad at all
when you’re using it. Everything responds
quickly and animations are smooth. The
apps and games we tried ran flawlessly,
thanks in part to the lower resolution
screen and Android 4.4.4.
Most benchmarks however put this device
quite low down in the list, even when
compared to similarly specced devices as
the Lenovo Vibe S1( though the S1 does
boast of 3GB of RAM) .
Camera: 6/10
HTC Desire 626
The camera on this device was a surprise.
A surprise because we didn’t expect a
decent camera in a device that HTC
seems to have forgotten. The shots in
daylight are fair, bordering on good.
There’s a fair amount of detail in the
images and the colours, while a bit on the
warmer side, are also acceptable. As with
the A9, the camera seems to have
considerable trouble metering reds and
they usually end up a shade of maroon.
Night shots were noisy and not very good,
but you’ll have to take our word for it. We
accidentally wiped the images from the
device when returning it, forgetting to
take a backup before hand. But it doesn’t
matter as the output was quite noisy and
focussing in low light was an exercise in
frustration.
Battery Life: 4/10
While the lack of software upgrades for
the device are bad enough, the problems
with the battery alone will dump this
device solidly in the “do-not-buy-under-
any-circumstances” category. We just
couldn’t get the device to charge properly
with the chargers that we had at our
disposal. HTC’s own QuickCharge 2.0
compatible charger would charge the
device at record speed, but the device
would also drain in record speed. We had
to try multiple chargers before we found
some low power chargers that would
charge the device at a reasonable enough
rate and got it to hold charge for longer
than an hour.
Even after spending hours charging the
device, our standard battery test would
fail and thus, we don’t even know how
well it fares in our battery life tests.
Anecdotally we can say that the battery
life was abysmal and we’d consider it a
good day if the device managed to give
us about 4-5 hours of usage. This is
terrible because even the worst phones
we tested managed to push out 6 hours
of usage.
