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HTC Desire 626 Review

2015-08-25
HTC's most recent entry into their desire lineup boasts both a bold design and an affordable price tag but is HTC's attempt enough to compete with the likes of Motorola and Asus this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and this is my full review of the HTC Desire 6 to 6 the desire 6 to 6 is design is very similar to that of last year's Desire eye with a few tweaks go on is the larger 13 megapixel front facing camera and with it goes the camera shutter button there's also an absence of a dual LED flash presumably to cut down on costs while the design could be considered recycled there was never really anything wrong with held the desire I looked or felt in the hand and that remains the case with the 6 to 6 with 6 different color options each featuring complementary accents there's a good chance that you'll find one that suits your taste regardless of the color option however the desire 6 to 6 is certain to feel nice in the hand although the phone is made of entirely plastic it still feels fairly solid it's also relatively thin and light at 8.1 millimeters and 139 grams while you can't access the 2000 milliamp hour battery you can access both a single SIM slot and a micro SD card slot by opening the flap on the left side of the device HTC says that you can expand the storage by up to 200 gigabytes if the eight gigabytes of internal storage isn't enough the power and volume buttons are positioned on the right side of the device and both are disappointingly mushy there's little tactile feedback and while HTC may not have the best record for tactile feeling buttons it's a shame that they didn't take this opportunity to improve on this from the desire eye on the front you'll find a single front facing speaker on the bottom below HTC's branding as well as a 2 megapixel front facing camera on the top to the left of the earpiece the five inches 720p display on the desire 6 to 6 looks all right with good viewing angles it's a bit on the warmer side but not by much there does seem to be some weirdness going on with sharpening where texts and app icons look a bit off to my surprise there's no sending option to turn this off and it's unclear why this is like this powered by the quad-core 2:10 clocked at one point one gigahertz the desire 626 is a tad on the slower side well I never had the phone freeze I did notice some leg in certain areas as well as frequent stuttering during animations it's definitely still usable and the one-and-a-half gigabyte of RAM is nice to see and serve the one gigabyte and provides a better multitasking experience with the adrenal 304 the desire 626 is able to play most casual games but higher-end games seem to struggle a bit in addition to slow load times I also noticed frequent frame drops in asphalt 8 on high-end occasional frame drops ball on medium the HTC Desire 6 to 6 is equipped with 802 11 and Wi-Fi GPS and GLONASS and Bluetooth 4.1 although the Wi-Fi signal is limited to 2.4 gigahertz I found the speeds and signal to be about on par with other devices since the desire 6 to 6 will be sold by US carriers you can be sure that each variant will fully support 4G LTE on it's respectable network while there is a single front facing speaker on the bottom of the desire 6 to 6 there's sadly no boom sound the speaker itself is a bit distorted and could be louder but it's still much better than virtually all rear facing speakers the 2000 milliamp hour 9 user replaceable battery provides disappointing battery life and will make it through a full day of use for many people during my battery life test I took the phone off the charger at 9:30 a.m. and was able to get it to last until about 9:30 p.m. with just over two hours of screen on time oddly enough HTC Sense UI hides screen on time values so that number was provided by GCM battery monitor what's more unfortunate than the battery capacity is the fact that you can't swap it out even if needed thankfully there is a power saver mode as well as an extreme power saver mode if you need to get the phone to lash just a little bit longer the eight megapixel rear camera is slightly better than average for this price point and it does perform quite well in properly lit conditions it does struggle when processing bright colors however but otherwise offers respectable image quality HTC's camera app offers a bunch of different shooting modes settings to change maximum ISO exposure value and white balance you can even save your settings as a shooting mode for later access which is a very handy feature running android 5.1 lollipop with HTC Sense 7 out of the box the desire 66 provides a very good software experience since it is an HTC device you'll be getting HTC blinkfeed launcher powerful multi-tasking menu customizable quick toggles and general interface tweaks HTC skin may be a departure from stock Android but unlike a few other Android skins it still offers a very nice user interface with a clear focus on design my only complaint about the software is the amount of blow wear that comes pre-installed out of the box well it will depend on your carrier my 18 T review unit included nearly a dozen AT&T apps just general crap digital life while tangent gains keeper key VPN look out uber yellow pages and a whole collection of redundant HTC apps are also present there's even three separate apps for reading email pre-installed which may confuse some users luckily you can uninstall most of the bloatware but it's still very annoying unlike on the HTC one devices there's sadly no double tap to wake or other gestures available on the 6 to 6 I also have doubts that this device will be updated to Android marshmallow as HTC has refused to update similar devices like the Desire 610 in the past if you do end up purchasing this phone don't expect to receive any operating system updates the HTC Desire 626 will be available for purchase on several US carriers soon but you do need to be aware that the model that we're referring to in this review is actually a refined edition of the six to six proper released back in March sometimes referred to as the 6 to 6s but still branded as the 6 to 6 it's a bit confusing but you can easily tell the difference between the two by looking at the specifications if you're on a tee you'll be able to acquire the HTC Desire 6 to 6 for $1 with a two-year contract or for about $185 on AT&T next spread out across 28 months although the HTC Desire 6 to 6 offers a very nice design and build quality a good camera and an excellent software experience its flaws are significant the display does seem to have some sharpening issues the performance is relatively poor and the battery won't last many users through a full day of use while the desired 6 to 6 may have been a good choice at this price a year ago the market today is much more competitive with competing options like the $200 Asus zenfone 2 and $180 moto G third generation even if you are a diehard HTC fan you'd be much better off by picking up a used one m8 for about $200 thank you for watching this video and please make sure to give it a thumbs up below if you enjoyed it also please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more content and feel free to leave a comment below finally be sure to visit the Android Authority website for additional coverage is we are your source for all things Android
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