HTC Desire 610 review: How desirable is it a year after?

At Mobile World Congress back in February of 2014, together with the Desire 816 as well as the much awaited HTC One (M8) flagship, HTC also announced its lower range Desire 610 smartphone. Even though the 610 had the same processor as the 816, it was the least powerful among the three, but more importantly, it was also the cheapest. The 610 did however have another trump card in its sleeve, in the form of its 4G LTE connection. In fact, the device was probably one of the first mid-tier devices to offer that when it arrived.

Coming out at the same period, the HTC Desire 610 had inherited the same design concept as the M8 but it did not have the same material nor the fine craftsmanship. This is simply because the 610 is aimed at an entirely different price group (and it seemed like it was going to be a big hit with its lower price range). In Malaysia, the 610 was launched here in May of last year (also at the same time as the 816 and M8) but the device didn’t get much of a traction as other cheaper Chinese brands were making their presence here in a big way. Anyhow, let’s close up the intro and delve right into the device shall we?

Design and hardware

The review unit that I got was in White and though it’s not a colour that will grab one’s attention when they see it, the shiny white back, the matte white sides and the white bezel around the dark display worked well in making it look good. It’s fortunate that the Desire 610 has One M8’s handsome front. The speaker grilles above and below the display may not look as refined as it does on the more opulent cousin but the 610 does shouts fun. Also adorning the front are the front camera, a minute notification light, and the almost invisible proximity/light sensor. The nano-SIM and microSD card slots are located on the left side of the phone, and these are concealed under a utilitarian flap. The earphone jack and the power/standby button sit at the top, the volume rocker takes its place on the right side, and the micro-USB port can be located at the bottom of the phone. The phone sat nicely in the palm of my hand and this is mostly due to the shiny plastic back and its curved edges. The back also holds the rear camera and its complementary flash, as well as a pinhole: which I think might be the noise cancelling microphone but unfortunately, I’m still unable to confirm this.

There are two different types of plastic that is being used for the casing; with the aforementioned shiny one protecting the back, and a matte one that is used to cover the top and bottom parts of the front, the sides, as well as the buttons. The hardy plastic case is more than capable of roughing out a few bumps down the road but you simply must not go to town with it.

Accessing the buttons using just one hand was also not a concern as the snug-fitting design and its thickness make it easy to move it around your palm without losing grip of the device. The flap covering the slots for the nano-SIM and the microSD cards was not the best-designed but it certainly is one of the easiest to use (just as long as you remember to push in the top portion first to close and then press the middle to seal it). Both slots are spring loaded and your cards should move in without resistance. Having said that, I did have a bit of a problem with nano-SIM slot but it’s only because of my self-cut SIM. This was easily fixed with a little bit of filing on the plastic back of my SIM card to make it uniform and slightly thinner.

Anyhow, here are the specifications for the HTC Desire 610:

• 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (MSM8926) CPU and Adreno 305 GPU.
• Runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat with HTC Sense 6.0 and HTC BlinkFeed.
• 4.7”, 960 x 540 (FWVGA), TFT LCD screen with a pixel density of 234.35 ppi.
• 1 GB RAM, 8 GB internal memory and accepts microSD card of up to 64 GB.
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with Wi-Fi Direct and supports WISPr, Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX, DLNA, and micro-USB 2.0.
• Supports GPRS, EDGE, HSPA+ and 4G LTE Cat 3. Single nano-SIM slot.
• 8 MP auto-focusing rear camera with CMOS BSI sensor, and LED flash. 1.3 MP front camera with FSI sensor. Aperture for the rear camera is rated at f/2.4.
• FM Radio with support for SoundHound song identifier, and HTC BoomSound front-firing stereo speakers.
• 2,040 mAh, non-removable, Li-polymer battery.
• 143.1 x 70.5 x 9.6 mm and weighs 143.5 g.
• Comes in Black, White, Orange, Green, Blue and Gray colour options.

Display and sound

The 4.7” display and its FWVGA display may not seem like much for the asking price but it does a decent enough job. It didn’t look as good compared to another phone I had but on it’s own, you can be forgiven to think they’re the display on the 610 is the best you’ve seen. It helps too that the phone runs HTC’s Sense UI, which must have been tweaked to look good on all their displays. HTC’s icons, widgets, wallpapers, menu, letters, and numbers looked great on the display. I did see a bit of a hesitation when I was trying to view a document under the sun but it was not a deal breaker. On the other hand, the auto brightness feature was a major annoyance. I can’t be certain if it was a sensor fault or the algorithm, but the display was adjusting the brightness like crazy. The placement of the light sensor is another issue as it gets under the left thumb when holding the phone sideways (with the camera positioned at the upper left corner). As a quick fix, I had to remember to switch to the other side so that the front camera will then sit at the bottom right.

Moving on to the sound, the phone’s external speaker was not as exciting as I had expected. The BoomSound is turned on by default when in speaker mode but that didn’t help with anything. You could hear the stereo effect when held in front but the sound fell flat. This was expected on a mobile device as even the HTC One M8 had troubles with deeper tones. All that I can say is that the front firing speakers may have brought out a better sound but this is far from the best that I’ve heard on a smartphone.

The included HTC Music player can download album art, artist photos and even lyrics and those can be set to automatically do that when connected to Wi-Fi. The app played audio files just fine but the odd thing was, I heard a better stereo separation on the external speakers using Play Music app than with the built-in player (if my ears aren’t deceiving me). This is something other owners will have to confirm as time and time again, using different audio and video sources, I experienced the same phenomenon.

The external speakers were quite loud for calls and notifications, and voices sounded great on the earpiece. The one thing that got me annoyed with the 610 though is how the volume control is configured. On most Android devices, pressing and holding the volume down button while on home screen will bring the ringtone volume down to its minimum and then stop at vibrate mode. One more downward press and the phone goes into the completely silent mode; where even the vibration will be turned off. On HTC phones though, holding down the volume down button will take the phone straight into vibrate mode. This can be good or bad, depending on the individual. I didn’t like the fact that, when I’m at/heading into a meeting or a cinema (where I simply want complete silence), I had to look at the phone to ensure that it goes into the completely silent mode, which is a one-step up from the vibrate mode. But then again lies another unique feature of a HTC device: it is possible for users, who have activated auto lock on the phone (using patterns and such), to be able to change the ring volume by just activating the screen, but without unlocking the device. Pretty useful stuff when you’ve got a complicated pattern lock.

Camera

Moving on to the camera, I was quite satisfied with what the 610 produced. There are quite a number of shooting options (ISO Settings, Exposure Values, White Balance), effects (with adjustable Distortion, Vignette, Depth of field, Dots, and Mono), and 10 different filters for users to work with. The interface on the whole was very clean, straightforward, and users will be able to delve into more options pretty quickly.

The camera worked really well outdoors during the day and will make you forget that it only has 8 megapixels. I’ve always been generally happy with HTC’s cameras in that sense and the Desire 610 is no exception. What really disappointed me though was its indoor performance. The images that I had managed to capture indoors looked fine on the phone but on the bigger and better display of a laptop, the shortcomings became apparent.

Shooting with default settings, I ended up with images that had soft edges, a lot of noise, some had low contrasts, and in conclusion, gave me terrible images. Manually adjusting the camera settings didn’t produce anything that was drastically better and didn’t help much. And don’t get me started on its low-light performance, or rather the lack of. When shooting in low light, the captured images felt abysmal without the LED flash but the camera was able to capture a bit more details when it was turned back on. Still, the camera on the 610 is strictly meant for outdoors in bright daylight. Perhaps I was asking too much of the 8 MP shooter but I still feel HTC could have done better.

Here are some sample images:

Keyboard

The 610 had 2 Google Keyboards (Google Korean Input and Google Pinyin Input) as well as the in-house developed HTC Sense Input. The HTC one is not a bad option when compared to Google’s own but it’s not the best I’ve used. The predictions and the trace feature can be somewhat inaccurate at times but it’s still much better than nothing at all.

By default, the Korean Input was turned on (which I believe could have been the original destination of the review unit) but I was not able to get rid of it after a factory reset and I was not able to uninstall it. I was able to uninstall the Pinyin Input so that’s still good, but starting off a device with 3 keyboards is not a good idea in my opinion. I was still able to use the Korean one as a normal English Keyboard though after changing the language but not being able to remove it completely will still be a sore point.

Operating System and UI

I have a personal respect for what HTC has done with Sense UI from its early days and I admit I’m a big fan. The result of Sense combining with the underlying OS delivers a great experience for users. It would seem that HTC has mastered the art of taking the power of the Android OS, and its sometimes confusing facets, and have them tamed with the Sense UI. HTC has also made it easier for users migrating from other platforms and gets them to start using its devices without having a lot to deal with. Having said that, getting started on the 610 was not the easiest part, especially when loading up or transferring older data. But once the phone got going, everything fell into its place. I received a notification for a software update as soon as I was logged on, and was able to proceed with the download; so that at least assures me that the device will receive FOTA or other upgrades in the future.

HTC also also made a number of its own apps available on Play Store and these can be updated as and when it’s necessary, instead of waiting longer for other OTA push from HTC. I’ve always welcomed this move and I hope to see more and more apps move to the Play Store so that the size of the OTA updates could be reduced; users won’t have to download files for apps that they don’t use or have disabled.

HTC BlinkFeed and HTC Zoe

BlinkFeed is easily one of my most favourite service/app by HTC. It’s beautiful and functional and will become a go-to-tool for people to quickly access news from multiple sources. The app is actually the launcher and the BlinkFeed service is built into it. The service can be turned off or on by easily removing/adding another page to your home screens. The BlinkFeed page resides on extreme left side and can also be set as the default home screen. The service is powered by popular news aggregator, Mobiles Republic (now called News Republic), and it provides contents in 14 different categories as well as BlinkFeed Picks. Those content are on top of user’s own data such as feeds from Calendar, Zoe and other social networks.

Another interesting app by HTC is Zoe. It’s like a photo/video gallery and video editor/maker that comes with its own selection of music to go with your highlight video creations, as well as its own social network consisting of other Zoe users worldwide. I didn’t bother much about creating and sharing those highlight videos but I did enjoy going through other works that have been submitted to the service. Although HTC published the Zoe app in Play Store for other Android 4.4 running devices, I was not able to download it for five other devices except for the Ninetology U9Z1T.

Other features

• SoundHound (both free and paid) acoustic fingerprint service (music identification) can be used with the built in Radio app. Shazam and TrackID unfortunately do not enjoy the same privilege.
• Sense Voice, which is essentially made up of two built-in microphones, detects outside noise and bumps up the in-call volume accordingly.
• The HTC Advantage on this phone is a free 50GB Google Drive upgrade for 2 years.
• If a call comes in while the phone is placed on a table, users can either flip the phone over to mute, or pick up the device to lower the ringing volume.
• Swipe up with three fingers to choose a device to share contents such as photos, videos, and music with. Users can also share streaming media from apps such as YouTube.
• If there’s an SD card on the phone, images will be stored there by default but if you don’t it will go to the phone’s storage. In case you do add an SD card later while the camera is in use, the phone will ask if you’d want to change storage location and will start storing images from that point onwards into the external card.
• Kid Mode that loads up apps and services targeted to children while keeping the phone safe with unwanted changes using a separate dashboard for parents.
• Easy Mode for oversized and simplified buttons, contacts and options.

Performance, connectivity and battery life

The review unit that I had did have a bit of a hiccup to get things started. When Reuben was trying it out, the device got stuck at the HTC Advantage sign-in screen during the initial setup and there was no response from the home button, but he managed to get it going again after he had pressed the back button. Things were shaky when he tried to check for saved backup as well, just as it was with the launching of the HTC Transfer Tool. Perhaps it’s the processor trying to cope with all the instructions that are coming in or maybe it’s just the OS. One thing’s for certain though, starting off on a blank phone and trying to load your previous stuff is going to be a bumpy ride. I’d suggest to let the phone boot properly before attempting everything else. Just when you thought everything was ready (when you finally see the wallpaper), the phone got stuck again for a good 10 seconds before the launcher finally loaded.

These days, the 1 GB RAM on-board does go out fast, especially when you’ve got apps that do not support moving to SD card. Just having my common apps and 3 games was enough for the phone to tell me that I could not update my apps. As usual, I had to clear the cache to proceed to update whatever I’ve installed. Using GPS was not a good experience either as the system keeps shutting the app down when the screen goes off. This could be related to the low memory but the OS should have been able to give priority to certain apps that do run in the background. A MicroSD card would indeed be a good investment too as it’ll help ease the load by moving all media files out of the built-in storage.

Here are some test results for the Desire 610:

• 3DMark Ice Storm: 5772
• 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme: 2881
• 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited: 4841
• PCMark: 2762
• AuTuTu: 19016
• Quadrant Standard: 10077
• Vellamo HTC stock browser: 1855
• Vellamo Chrome Browser: 1781
• Vellamo Multicore: 1169
• Vellamo Metal: 703

For data, the LTE connection worked fine but I did have some troubles with the Wi-Fi. There’s a slight lag when automatically connecting to a Wi-Fi hotspot, but this is no life threatening problem, and neither is the lack of a 5 Ghz band. The 610 will do just fine with current technologies.

Battery life on the device is commendable and there are plenty of options to help you save more juice. If the normal ‘Power saver’ mode doesn’t do you justice, you’ll be glad to know that HTC has also included an ‘Extreme power saving mode’, that can be set to automatically turn on when the phone reaches any of the 3 preset battery levels, as well as a ‘Sleep mode’, that could turn off data connection completely when the device goes on long periods of inactivity. The saving battery part was good but not the turning off.

Wrap-up

The HTC Desire 610 was a good phone when it first arrived but has since lost almost all of its appeal. The uprising of Chinese brands in the local market also had a major impact on the 610 as their phones were offered at a much lower price point. A year after its appearance here in Malaysia, the Desire is still a decent phone for what it offers, and is probably one of the first mid-tier devices to have stereo speakers at the front and LTE. Still, the 610 is way too pricey for what it has to offer, even when it first appeared here, and this is why it’s definitely a pass for me.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Pretty decent camera in bright lights.
• Sense UI has a nice mix of features and options to allows users to stop worrying about the extra settings and just start using the phone.
• Stereo front speakers.

Cons

• Some apps keep shutting down or force closes when the phone goes into sleep mode.
• Not a good fit for users buying it for gaming.
• Awful auto brightness.

Pricing and availability

Being a HTC device certainly has its plus points when it comes to resale value. The phone was originally priced at RM 999 when it was first launched but you should be able to get them now from anything between RM 694 to RM 850.

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