Manufacturer: HTC

HTC Desire 500 hands-on

What is the HTC Desire 500?

The HTC Desire 500 is a lower-end phone than either the HTC One or the HTC One Mini. It costs around £230 SIM-free, meaning you’ll be able to grab one on a fairly low-end contract. It may not impress in quite the same way as the One brothers, but this cute phone is worth keeping an eye on if you don’t want to spend the earth on your next mobile.

Want a new phone now? Head to our best mobile phones 2013 round-up.

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HTC Desire 500 – Design

Where the HTC One-series phones have an obsession with aluminium, the HTC Desire 500 is made of plastic. It’s glossy plastic too, giving it a look comparable with that of the Samsung Galaxy S4.

It instantly feels like a well-made phone, though. Unlike most of Samsung’s Android mobiles, the Desire 500 doesn’t have removable battery cover, making it easier for HTC to keep the body feeling strong and hard despite being made of plastic.

There are some cute design touches too, such as the colour trim that runs around the side of the phone. We saw the white and blue edition, but there are also white/red and black editions (which looks a lot like the Desire X.)

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It’s a good-looking phone, and is both slim (ish) and pretty light too – at 9.9mm thick and 123g. The HTC Desire 500’s curves are also distinctive enough to stop it from the generic-looking fate of something like the Huawei Ascend Y300.

HTC Desire 500 – Screen

Perhaps the clearest spec cut in the HTC Desire 500 is the screen. In person it looked pretty good, with decent black levels and solid colour reproduction, but it’s a pretty low-end display, spec-wise.

It is 4.3 inches across and has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. It’s a clear step down from the 720p HTC One Mini. However, there wasn’t too clear pixellation in the parts of the OS we gave a spin, suggesting HTC’s interface uses some clever text smoothing to mitigate the low resolution.
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HTC Desire 500 – Software

Software-wise, the HTC Desire 500 is a lot like the HTC One Mini. It has the latest version of the HTC Sense UI, which comes with the BlinkFeed home screen.

This is a scrolling feed of updates from your favourite sources – be they social networks or websites. HTC Sense is perhaps the classiest of all the third-party Android interfaces, and it brings a level of sophistication that should help to give the Desire 500 something over its mid-range rivals.

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Performance from our brief play with the phone seemed good too. We had a look at a pre-production device, but did not notice any notable lag even in this early model.

The HTC Desire 500 has a low mid-range CPU, a bit slower than the ones found in the HTC One Mini and HTC One. It’s a Qualcomm MSM8225Q Snapdragon 200 processor, a quad-core 1.5GHz model. That may sound very nippy, but its cores are the basic Cortex-A5 type, which are not powerhouses.

Its GPU is the Adreno 203 – again a few rungs below HTC’s more famous One-series phones. However, it should provide enough grunt to play 3D games like Real Racing 3 fairly well thanks to the phone’s low screen resolution.

HTC Desire 500 – Camera

With the HTC Desire 500 you also miss out on the UltraPixel camera tech HTC launched earlier this year – which provides larger sensor pixels for better low-light performance. This phone has a pretty standard 8-megapixel camera with an LED flash.
HTC Desire 500
It should produce decent shots in good lighting, but won’t have the low-light performance of an HTC One-series phone. It also cannot shoot video at resolutions above 720p.

The HTC Desire 500 does have a particularly good front-facing camera, a 1.6-megapixel one. This is probably down to HTC deciding that the Desire 500 will appeal to a younger audience obsessed with Facebook, selfies and incessant #YOLO’ing.

We’re not particularly bothered about the front-facing camera, but we are a little sad to see the Desire 500 lose the stereo Boomsound speakers of the HTC One Mini. Instead, the phone has a mono speaker that sits on the rear. It does have Beats processing, though, which can significantly improve the tonality of a teeny phone speaker.

First Impressions

The HTC Desire 500 seems a solid mid-level phone. Its CPU isn’t super-powerful despite being quad-core and it doesn’t have a headline-grabbing camera. However, we like its software, its hardware design, and its screen seems to be fairly decent despite some pretty low-end specs. We’ll be back with the full verdict soon.