First impressions of Desire 626 – HTC’s mid-range offering

LaptopMedia.com Highlights First impressions of Desire 626 - HTC's mid-range offering

From: Hristiyan Tsutsev 12 October 2015 / 10:55 | 0

HTC-Desire-6261
We recently got our hand on HTC Desire 626 – a mid-range model, which review you can expect in the near future. As always, before we start running our performance, battery, temperatures and other tests, we’re going to share our first impressions of the device. It is important to note, that there are two versions of the model – Desire 626 and Desire 626G. The main difference between the two is in the SoC – Snapdragon 410 and MediaTek MT6752 respectively. We’re going to share the performance difference between the two in our upcoming review.

If you are interested in the price and availability of the device, you can check it at the following link: http://amzn.to/1RxT5aK

The first thing we noticed, when holding the Desire 626, is that device offers a very comfortable grip mainly due to the 5-inch screen and relatively thin profile – 8.2 mm. The matte cover of the sides also helps as it provides a more secure feeling when handling the phone. However, the back of the device is sleek and glossy but fingerprints are hardly noticeable, at least on the white model that we currently have. Another interesting highlight of the design is the position of both SIM card slots and the microSD memory card slot. They are located at the top left side of the smartphone and have a protective cover.

The device is running Android 5.1 Lollipop and HTC Sense 7.0 on top. HTC’s user interface is famous for its many neat features and simplicity. Some of the most interesting features are the entertaining and informative HTC Zoe and BlinkFeed. There are also a lot of user modes available – one of them is designed for children use – KidMode, while another offers easier way to navigate through the device while driving by showing only the most important features on the home screen – Car mode. In our in-depth review, we’re going to take a look at all of the aforementioned options and features as well as the many pre-installed applications.

We don’t know how the battery will perform yet and for now we can only say that its capacity is 2000 mAh and that there are a couple of power saving modes available. Perhaps, the most interesting one is the Extreme Power Saving mode, which appears to be very similar to Samsung’s Ultra Power saving mode, as it turns down the screen’s brightness, changes the color scheme to a darker one and restricts the capabilities of the phone to its basics. All of this has a very positive impact on the battery life. You can also adjust it to automatically activate once you reach a certain percentage.

As far as the camera department is concerned, the HTC Desire 626 boasts a 13MP rear camera with autofocus and LED flash. Even though it doesn’t offer many shooting modes, there are a lot of options like white balance, ISO, etc. that can be manually tweaked in the camera settings menu. The sensor is able to shoot videos in Full HD resolution and in slow motion. We’re going to put the device’s camera through our tests and you can expect the results from them in our in-depth review. Also, we will soon share an article with some sample photos taken with the Desire 626, so you can get a general idea of the photo quality.

Specs sheets

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OS	Android 5.1 (Lollipop)
CPU	MediaTek MT6752 (8-cores, 1.70GHz, Cortex-A53) Snapdragon 410 (4-cores, 1.21GHz, Cortex-A53)
RAM	1GB / 2GB
Storage	8GB / 16GB
GPU	Mali-T760MP2 / Adreno 306
Display	5-inch capacitive multitouch screen with 1280 x 720 pixels resolution
Connectivity	Bluetooth v4.0, A2DP, apt-X, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS, A-GPS
Cameras	13MP with autofocus and LED flash (rear), 5MP (front)
Features	Dual SIM card phone (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by) microSD memory card slot, supports up to 32GB microUSB v2.0 port built-in speaker 3.5 mm headphone jack camera with geo-tagging, touch to focus, face recognition, panorama FM radio accelerometer proximity sensor
Battery	2000 mAh
Dimensions	70.9 x 146.9 x 8.2 mm
Weight	138 grams