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HTC Desire 626 Dual SIM Quick Review, Camera Samples And Gaming

HTC announced its new mid-range 4G enabled smartphone, Desire 626 Dual SIM in India. The handset will be available in two attractive colour options including Blue Lagoon and White Birch. The HTC Desire 626 is priced at INR 14,990 and it comes with decent set of specifications on paper. Desire 626 was released in China and some other parts of the globe in 2015 but it has made its entry in India with revived specs this year. Let’s find out more about the device in this quick review.

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HTC Desire 626 Specifications

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HTC Desire 626 Physical Overview

HTC has followed a totally different approach on this smartphone, as you won’t find any metal on the body, which is counted as a “premium” addition to the phones. It is made up of polycarbonate, which looks quite appealing. The soft touch on the body makes it feel great in the hand. The edges are of a contrasting color, which spices up the whole look and makes it more appealing.

Another appealing touch in the design is HTC’s dual front-facing speakers that are placed at the top and bottom of the phone. They do add to the overall size, but the phone is very comfortable to hold.


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If you have a look around the phone, the front top has the speaker grill in the center. Front camera is placed at the left with a thin chrome ring encircling it, and the LED notification light and sensors are placed below it.

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The left side has a rigid flap for your microSD card and SIM cards instead of a SIM tray.

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The volume rocker and power/lock keys are on the right side, these are made up of plastic and give good amount of feedback.

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At the bottom, you will find a microUSB port and the 3.5mm audio jack it on the top.

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The primary camera is located at the left top corner of th back with a single LED and a dedicated mic in the center.

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HTC Desire 626 Photo Gallery

Also See: 7 Things You Don’t Know About HTC One A9

HTC Desire 626 User Interface

HTC Desire 626 runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop and Sense 7.0 on top of it. HTC’s custom UI is famous for its minimalistic look, handy shortcuts, and not so reasonably present bloatware apps.

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By swiping right from the home screen, you can access the BlinkFeed like the other HTC smartphones. In the app menu, you’ll find few useful apps like movie studio, video highlights, HTC dot view and many more. You can find the all the Google apps in different folders, and in Productivity folder are located applications like notes, file manager and POLARIS Office 5 for creating, viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. There are also some other basic apps like news and weather, and a flashlight.

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The UI works smooth; there were no glitches in the animations and transitions. It is a very user friendly interface if compared to many others.

HTC Desire 626 Camera Overview

Desire 626 comes with a 13MP rear camera with CMOS BSI sensor, f/2.2 aperture and LED flash. We tested the camera outdoors, indoors and in more different scenarios, but the performance did not impress us looking at the price tag. We have uploaded some sample shots in the photo gallery below and you can take a look and judge the picture quality. The camera is prone to shakes, tiniest of shakes can distort your picture while clicking with the camera. Colours were looking good but the details were again not impressive. We have seen better cameras in phones costing lesser than this.

The camera app offers a couple of manual settings and modes like panorama, self-portrait, HDR, text, macro, night mode, etc. When switched to the manual mode, users can customize white balance, ISO, exposure, and more. The camera can shoot 1080p videos @30fps and slow motion videos as well.

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The front camera is something that impressed us, it performed good while clicking selfies in outdoors and captures good amount of light for low light selfies. The details were nicely produced, but the pictures were short of rich colours.

HTC Desire 626 Camera Samples

HTC Desire 626 Gaming

As usual, we ran Dead Trigger 2 and Modern Combat 5 on this device to see how this device handles these games. HTC Desire 626 comes with MT6752 chipset, and it is considered to be an above average processor for gaming. The device performed decently with both the games initially. While playing Dead Trigger 2 (at high settings) we felt no issues with the gameplay except some rare frame drops. Modern Combat 5 also ran smoothly in the beginning but it started to slow down a bit when I reached higher levels but the issue was gone when I closed all the apps in background and restarted the game.

The Desire 626 was good at handling temperature, the hottest part of the smartphone was around the camera at 37.7 degrees Celsius while gaming and the phone was connected to the charger. The temperature at the middle part was around 35 degrees, where we usually hold the phone. From these results we can conclude that the MT6752 version of Desire 626 doesn’t posess heating problems and is easily usable after extended use.

Price & Availability

HTC Desire 626 comes in 2 colour variants- Blue Lagoon and White Birch. It is available for purchase at a price of INR 14,990 from with major retailers including Flipkart, Amazon and Shopclues.

Comparison & Competition

HTC Desire 626 falls in the price bracket of INR 10k-15k phones; it has got decent hardware for the price but sounds lacking on papers compared to its competition. But some phones like Lenovo Vibe S1, Motorola Moto G Turbo, Xiaomi Mi4i, InFocus M808, LeEco Le 1s and some more devices.

Conclusion

The competition in the lower-mid range of smartphones is very tough, due to the vast range of quality devices and this makes it tougher to rise up for Desire 626 Dual. However, if we do not compare it with the competition, it is a one complete phone with least weaknesses. Actually, the phone performs fair in every area and that what I think is the key.

But I was not happy with the battery and RAM management on this phone, as we have moved several steps ahead of what is found inside this particular device.

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Abhishek Bhatnagar

Abhishek Bhatnagar, a known technology blogger & YouTuber from India. A Software Engineer by qualification, now he works as the editor-In-Chief, Webmaster, & Managing Director at Gadgets To Use. He runs a number of other technology websites as well.