Meant to be a best-in-class midrange phone, HTC's Desire 816 lacks the fancy aluminum body of its more expensive sibling, the One M8. But this plastic-clad beauty keeps most of the style and a good share of the features too. Like the One Mini, it only cuts the right corners, ditching a few fancy extras that add to a smartphone's price, while keeping the essentials that make a mobile reliable, attractive, and useful.
Announced earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, HTC's Desire 816 was a real surprise. In fact, HTC itself seemed somewhat caught off guard -- the Desire 816 phones on display at the company's booth in Barcelona were non-functional prototypes. But now, almost three months later, the Desire 816 is ready for prime time.
The Desire 816 delivers a lot for a reasonable price -- around $400, £300 or AU$400 without a contract. For now, HTC is only releasing the Desire 816 in Europe and Asia, but you may be able to buy it in other regions online. It's expected to go on sale over the next month, with UK retailers listing early June as the expected date.

Design

HTC is unifying its range with a standard look, with the Desire 816 a prime example. The rounded edges do a good job of mimicking the One M8, despite being made of plastic.
Like the One M8, the 816 has front-facing BoomSound speakers, but instead of the fine laser-drilled grilles of its fancier sibling, the Desire 816 has several larger holes, which are really distinctive. The front-facing speakers make watching videos on the phone a much better experience, as you don't need to cup the speakers with your hand to redirect the sound to your ears.

The front-facing speakers look less distinguished than those on the One M8. Aloysius Low/CNET

The 5.5-inch HD screen is brilliant, with great viewing angles. While it's not a Full HD display, the 1,280x720-pixel resolution is more than sharp enough.
The 816 may not have the premium feel of the One M8, but its plastic chassis has its own charms, without the cheaper feel of some Samsung products. Just be aware that the back cover attracts fingerprints much too easily.
Instead, HTC seems to have taken inspiration from Apple's iPhone 5C, and the 816 sports a familiar shiny and glossy plastic rear. To make sure the phone doesn't slip from your hands, HTC has made the edges of the phone matte. Honestly, with the fingerprint issues, the Desire 816 would have been better served if the entire phone was covered in a similar finish.
Located on the left side is a flap that hides the microSD and nano-SIM card slots. There also appears to be another SIM card slot, but that's blocked up. HTC said that instead of creating a different model for the dual-SIM version of this phone, the company uses a unified design that can be tweaked for different features as needed, hence the unusable blocked slot.

While there are two nano-SIM card slots, one is blocked. Aloysius Low/CNET

Overall, the phone feels well-constructed and solid. It's slightly heavier than the One M8 at 5.8 ounces (165g) but the weight is properly balanced and quite comfortable to hold with one hand.
The Desire 816 is powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, has 8GB of onboard storage and 1.5GB of RAM. If 8GB doesn't sound like much space, fret not, as the phone has a microSD card slot. Connectivity wise, it comes with 4G LTE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but there's no NFC.
Like the One M8, the Desire 816 runs the new Sense 6 UI on top of Android KitKat (4.4.2), and it has all the goodies found on the flagship phone. You get BlinkFeed, the color-coded features and pretty new font. It also comes with 50GB of Google Drive storage free.
What's missing, however, are the gesture controls found on the One M8. You can't tap the display to wake up the handset. Nor can you turn the phone sideways and hold on to the volume rocker to turn on the camera. HTC feels it has to draw the line somewhere to separate its premium and midrange products, though it wouldn't surprise me if someone figures out how to port these features over (since they appear to be software-controlled) in a custom ROM.

Key features

• 5.5" 720p Super LCD2 capacitive touchscreen with 267ppi
• 1.6GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU; 1.5GB of RAM; Adreno 305 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset
• Android 4.4.2 KitKat with HTC Sense 6.0
• 13MP autofocus camera, 1080p video capture, F/2.2 aperture, 28mm lens; dual-LED flash
• 5MP front-facing camera with BSI sensor; HDR; 1080p video recording
• 8GB of built-in memory
• microSD card slot
• Accelerometer; gyro and proximity sensor; ambient light sensor; barometer
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated microphone
• Front-facing stereo speakers with BoomSound and built-in amplifiers
• 2,600mAh battery; Extreme Power Saving Mode
• HTC Zoe app

Main disadvantages

• Power key is on top, hard to reach on a big phone
• Side buttons are poorly positioned and feel cheap
• Small battery for a phablet
• Underwhelming stereo speaker loudness

The only big deal in the negative column is the relatively small battery - 2,600mAh is phone-grade battery capacity. It does have the Extreme power saving mode, but that's not meant for daily usage. We'll run our battery test to determine how much battery size hurts the phablet.
Other than that, the HTC Desire 816 checks all the right boxes - a promising 13MP / 1080p camera, a decent selfie cam, solid audio credentials, LTE connectivity, expandable storage and the latest software.

HTC Desire 816 chilling at our office
Flagship smartphones seem to have hit a wall with innovation and have started piling on gimmicky features. So it's segments like midrange phones and phablets that emerge as the new drivers of growth and we're glad HTC didn't miss that boat.
But how good a midrange phablet can we expect from a company that has so far been most prominent in the premium smartphone business? Reception in China has been great, with millions of people genuinely interested in the Desire 816 but flip to the next page for a more Western perspective on it.

Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Sense 6

The HTC Desire 816 runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat, dressed in the version of HTC Sense UI, matching the One (M8) and One mini 2. HTC Sense 6 brings new features on board and improves the existing functionality of the user interface.
Here goes a quick video of HTC Desire 816 with Sense 6 in action.
The lockscreen features a clock with weather info plus four shortcut slots. Missed calls and incoming messages are duly displayed too of course. Widgets are optional and disabled by default.
Swiping up the unlock button gives you three different options. Swiping up takes you to the last app you used, while swiping to the left or to the right will take you to the homescreen or BlinkFeed respectively.

HTC Sense 6 lockscreen with optional widgets
Unlike the HTC One (M8) the Desire 816 phablet cannot be unlocked with a swipe or double tap, meaning you have to reach for the power/lock key.
This generation of HTC products features on-screen buttons with the classic arrangement of Back, Home and App switcher. HTC's custom scheme of Back and Home only has been dropped (and we don't miss it).
The leftmost homescreen pane of the Desire 816 is once again reserved for HTC BlinkFeed. It aggregates content from your social networks, as well as from over a thousand news sources. You can pick what topics you're interested in and BlinkFeed will automatically pull relevant content. You can also search for specific content.

BlinkFeed combines social updates with news articles
You're not stuck with BlinkFeed if you don't like it - the rest of the homescreen panes are the standard affair with shortcuts and widgets. You can also fully remove the BlinkFeed panel if you wish.

BlinkFeed panel can be fully removed • regular homescreens are available too
The notification area features toggles similar to those of vanilla Android. They can be accessed via the dedicated button or with a two-finger swipe. The toggles can't be reordered or hidden, but a long press brings out the relevant Settings page. Some (like the Brightness toggle) are multi stage so you tap them several times until you reach the desired mode.

Power toggles made it to the notification area
Note that the status bar on top of the screen is normally semi-transparent or black, but select HTC apps change its color to match their own highlight color, similar to iOS. This doesn't seem to work with third-party apps though.
The default layout of the app drawer is a 4 x 5 grid of app icons. A 3 x 4 mode is also available but that's a waste of a 5.5" screen. You can sort app icons alphabetically, chronologically or manually and you can hide the ones you don't need but can't uninstall (bloatware).

The app drawer • sorting options • searching
HTC has remodeled the task switching interface - recent apps are displayed in a 3 x 3 grid of thumbnails. This allows more apps to fit on the screen but since there's no scrolling 9 is all the recent apps you'll see.

Custom app switcher • there's a shortcut for the Running apps screen
HTC Sense has a dedicated Car mode screen, which can launch automatically when the phablet connects to your car's Bluetooth.

Car mode with big, easy to hit buttons
HTC Desire 816 also has a built-in restricted access Kid mode. It is an app that lets you set up a profile for each of your kids, with a photo and birthdate and pick which apps they can have access to.

Kid Mode

Camera

Instead of the Ultrapixel camera found on the One M8, HTC chose to use a more conventional 13-megapixel shooter instead. Now, some of you may be thinking that this is an upgrade -- after all, one of the biggest complaints about the Ultrapixel camera is the lowly 4-megapixel resolution, so you'll get more details with 13 megapixels, right?
While you do get more detail, the images taken with the Desire 816 can be quite noisy. This is quite noticeable at 100 percent crop. That said, if you're always taking pictures with good lighting, you'll definitely appreciate having more detail in your images.
Do note that the fancy picture effects found on the One M8, such as UFocus, aren't available on the 816, though you do get some image filters. The "Zoe" feature is also missing, so you won't be able to take quick video clips for sharing. The camera is quick to take a picture, but there's a delay in shot-on-shot times.

Indoor natural light (click to enlarge). Aloysius Low/CNET

HDR test shot (click to enlarge). Aloysius Low/CNET

Indoor lighting (click to enlarge). Aloysius Low/CNET

Performance

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 isn't the most powerful processor available, but that's the compromise you have to accept for the cheaper price tag. On the Quadrant benchmark, the Desire 816 did quite well, scoring 12,708 to easily surpass the two-year-old HTC One X. On the Linpack multi-thread test, the Desire 816 managed 288.813 MFLOPs.
I watched YouTube videos, surfed the Web and switched between apps with nary a pause. The only issue I encountered was the slightly slow camera shutter, as mentioned above.

Call quality

The call quality of the phone showed no issues at all, though the audio volume did seem a tad too loud. I found myself adjusting the volume down often.

Battery life

Equipped with a 2,600mAh battery (the same as the One M8), the phone certainly doesn't match up to slightly bigger phablets such as the 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3 and 5.9-inch G Pro 2 with their 3,200mAh batteries. And although this isn't the first HTC device to have a non-removable battery, I'd much prefer a removable battery.
That said, the Desire 816 lasted a day of moderate use -- that's with two email accounts, Facebook and Twitter on push. If you're a heavy user, you may want to carry a charger with you. Do note that there's the option to turn on an "Extreme Power Saving" mode that should hopefully help it last long enough to get you to a charging point.

The Desire 816 has an embedded 2,600mAh battery.

Source
Engadget HTC Desire 816 Reviews (Critic Reviews 7.4/10) -May 7, 2014
GSM Areba HTC Desire 816 Reviews (Design 8.3/10, Features 8.1/10, Performance 8.1/10) -21 May, 2014
CNET HTC Desire 816 Reviews (CNET Editor's Rating 3.5/5) -May 7, 2014

The Good The HTC Desire 816's plastic body is well built. The brilliant 5.5-inch HD display has excellent viewing angles, and the quad-core processor runs smoothly, with hardly any lag.

The Bad The glossy plastic rear is a fingerprint magnet, which is especially noticeable on the darker models. The lack of a removable battery is disappointing, given its relatively small capacity.

The Bottom Line The HTC Desire 816's combination of solid design and quality performance strikes all the right chords to make it a compelling phone for its price.

Official Website

Where to Buy
$549.99 WElectronics HTC DESIRE 816