HTC Desire 500 review

An affordable quad-core Android phone let down by poor timing

For the past few years technology companies have been working to bring smartphones to the masses, releasing a steady stream of semi-affordable handsets. But these affordable smartphones have generally featured poor internal components and offered terrible performance.

HTC's latest Desire 500 is a clear move to fix this problem, offering quad-core performance while costing just £199. However, as it was released alongside the similarly affordable and slightly higher-specced Motorola Moto G, it's reasonable to ask if the Desire 500 is too little too late from the Taiwanese firm.

Design and build
Visually the Desire 500 is quite nice. The white model we reviewed had a smooth, slightly curved single-piece polycarbonate chassis that neatly connected to its red metal sides. The 500 was also very comfortable in hand, with its 132x67x9.9mm dimensions and 123g weight making it suitably ergonomic and easy to hold.

We were also fairly pleased with the Desire 500's build quality. Despite it being a little prone to picking up dirt marks and fingerprints, the 500 feels fairly robustly built and we're fairly certain it could survive the odd accidental drop or bump.

Screen
We were slightly less enamoured with the Desire 500's 4.3in, 480x800, 217ppi display. This is because, the display doesn't match the 4.5in 1280x720, 329ppi screen seen on the even cheaper £135 Moto G. This is a shame, as if we'd have reviewed the Desire 500 even a few weeks ago, the 217ppi display would have been above average for its price point.

Being fair to the 500, though, the screen is still more than usable and features decent brightness and colour balance, and offers users fairly reasonable viewing angles. Our only real qualm with the display is that it's slightly reflective and on a few rare occasions could pick up stray light, rendering the screen all but unreadable.

Next: Operating system, software and performance

HTC Desire 500 review

An affordable quad-core Android phone let down by poor timing

Operating system and software
Another shortcoming is the use of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean overlaid with HTC's own Sense 5 skin. This puts the Desire 500 a few generations behind the latest 4.4 KitKat version of Android. This is a little disappointing, as some of the KitKat upgrades are fairly good.

Chief among these is KitKat's updated Dialler app.
The upgraded app makes it so users can search for numbers not stored in their contacts list directly from the dialler, without having to fire up the phone's web browser. That said, Jelly Bean 4.1.2 isn't terrible and still features all Google's core productivity apps, such as Drive, Now and Calendar.

The use of Sense adds the same software features seen on HTC's more premier One series of smartphones. Chief of these is the BlinkFeed homescreen, a custom feature that debuted on the HTC One. It replaces the traditional Android home screen with a tiled news and social media aggregation service designed to push content to users.

BlinkFeed is designed to intelligently curate what content it pushes using data stored on linked social media accounts, and it has a manual control feature that lets the user specify which news outlets and topics they're interested in. BlinkFeed is a fairly useful service and makes it quicker and easier to scan the headlines relevant to your sector on the way to and from work.

Performance
The HTC Desire 500's primary selling point is its quad-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor. Backed up by 1GB of RAM, the Desire 500 should match the performance of most mid-range smartphones, and it scored a reasonable 10,656 when benchmarked on Antutu. This puts it just below most top-end 2012 Android phones but significantly lower than the Snapdragon 600-powered Moto G, which scored 16,787 on the same test.

In terms of real-world performance, however, the Desire 500 is still fairly good. While it doesn't have 4G connectivity, the phone was more than fast enough running on 3G and in general managed to load web pages and stream video stutter free. It was also able to open and run most apps without issue. The only time we noticed a minor glitch was when playing Grand Theft Auto 3, it chugged on some very rare occasions.

Next: Camera, battery, storage and overall

HTC Desire 500 review

An affordable quad-core Android phone let down by poor timing

Camera
The Desire 500 doesn't feature the custom UltraPixel technology debuted on the HTC One. Instead the Desire 500 packs a bare-bones 8MP rear camera, but even without the upgraded UltraPixel tech, for its price, the Desire 500 is alright at taking photos.

Taken on the HTC Desire 500

Images snapped in regular light generally featured reasonable colour levels and were more than crisp enough for sharing on social media sites or blogs. Images taken in lower light were significantly less impressive and rapidly became pixelated and noisy the darker it got – though to be fair this happens with most phones.

The Desire 500 features the usual assortment of shot modes, including Scene, Night, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Panorama and Anti-shake modes. The Night and HDR modes did manage to marginally improve the Desire 500's low-light performance, though images captured still weren't on a par with those taken on HTC's more expensive One series of smartphones.

Battery and storage
The Desire 500 is powered by a Lithium-ion 1,800 mAh battery that HTC claims can last for around 13 hours of 3G use. The phone easily lived up to this claim with regular use. Taking the phone off charge in the morning and using it throughout the day, the Desire 500 still had around half its charge the next day. Regular use included listening to music on the way to and from work, checking our email and social media accounts, watching a couple of YouTube videos and sending a few text messages.

Battery burning the Desire 500 by constantly looping a video file stored on the phone with the screen brightness set to automatic, the handset lasted around six hours on our first test, seven on our second, and six and a half on our third. This means the Desire performed slightly better than most other phones, which generally struggle to get beyond six hours when tasked with the same test.

Sadly the Desire 500 comes with a tiny 4GB of storage built in, though luckily this can be upgraded to a maximum of 64GB using its micro SD card slot.

Overall
The HTC Desire 500 is a solid, affordable phone. It offers businesses a £199 quad-core Android experience and boasts a reasonably decent rear camera. But being released just weeks before the cheaper and higher-specced Motorola Moto G – which runs using a more recent version of Android, has a better screen and even more powerful Snapdragon 600 processor – the Desire 500's long-term appeal is questionable.